Quotes from Max Hastings

The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew.

All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time.

Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand.

The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity.

Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: 'People like you', he said to me, 'are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better.

It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane.

Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat; its moral, they said, was that "Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.

70 per cent to avoid a humiliating defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor) – 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life'.

On 1 November the old OSS man arrived by appointment at army headquarters, wearing uniform and carrying a .357 revolver together with $US40,000 in cash, which he deemed the appropriate fashion accessories for an afternoon's work overthrowing a government.

The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world is approaching.

After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some

dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen.

The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.

In the course of the war, 168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion;

Looking back later, we could see that the military code was unreasonable. But at that time, we regarded dying for our country as our duty. If men had been allowed to surrender honourably, everybody would have been doing it.