The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good and difficult for them to do evil. --Gladstone No government is respectable which is not just. --Webster

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. -- Jefferson True liberty consists in the privilege of enjoying our own rights, not in the destruction of the rights of others. --Pinckard

Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not conflict, and that our rea eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war. --McKinley

Equal and exace justice to all men, of whatever state of persuasion, religious or political; peace commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliance with none. --Jefferson.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education without which neither justice nor freedom can be permanently maintained. --Garfield Education is our only political safety. --H. Mann

The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves. Cowley. Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. Everett. --Placard above the stairway to the entrance of the Senate in the Minnesota State Capitol.

This Dictionary was begun, with the view of supplying, at a price within the reach of all, a public want, which the editor had found to exist, for a small word-book which should comprise all the primitive, and most of the derivative words

And thus I clothe my naked villainy With old odd ends stolen out of Holy Writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil. --William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, scene v.

I was in combat for six weeks, forty-two days. --Studs Terkel, “The Good War” (1984)

When Hitler, having secured his eastern frontier by the lightning elimination of Poland, turned west to pursue his ambition to dominate Europe, one principal factor stood between

German weather forecasters predicted all western Europe would be enshrouded by the fog that screened Adolph Hitler’s last mad lunge westwards out of Nazi Germany. -- Fred MacKenzie, The Men of Bastogne (1968)

On the night of August 23, 1939, I attended a particularly gay party. --Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (1944)

In my childhood in Holland—I may have been fifteen or sixteen years of age—I remember one evening accompanying my parents to church when prayers were offered there for the return of the People of Israel to the Holy Land. --Pierre Van Paassen, The Forgotten Ally (1943)

On August 2nd, 1274, Edward of Westminster the crusader landed at Dover. --Arthur Bryant, The Age of Chivalry (1963)

I enlisted in the Marine Corps on 3 December 1942 at Marion, Alabama. --E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981)

The gap between generations, unless it is to become a chasm and make history meaningless, must somehow be bridged. --James P. O’Donnell, The Bunker (1978)

It was not self-evident in the ideology of the new Soviet state founded by Lenin that this was to be a militaristic or even well-armed society. -- Harold Shukman, Ed., Stalin’s Generals (1993)

On 8 June 1950, newspapers of the city of P’yongyang, capital of Chosun Minjujui Inmun Kongwhakuk, the North Korean People’s Republic, printed a manifesto of the Central Committee of the United Democratic Patriotic Front. --T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War (1963)

Storm-battered, with the pumps working every watch, the little squadron fled westward before the contrary winds. --James L. Stokesbury, Navy and Empire (1983)

The biggest warship in the world arose from the outer reaches of Kure harbor, a mountainous island of gray steel. --Russell Spurr, A Glorious Way to Die (1981)

It was only a hundred days since the invasion of Normandy, but as the first cool nights of fall arrive, the Allied command was confident the war in Europe would soon be over. --Howard Blum, The Brigade (2001)

The cycle of interest in the Civil War has come around again, as inevitable as a wheel turning, and the indications are that it won’t soon go away. --Robert Cowley, Ed., With My Face to the Enemy (2001)

When the Space Age is mentioned, most people think of Sputnik, the launching into orbit of the first man-made satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 2957, or the race between Russia and the United States to land men on the moon. --Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War (2009)

Some weeks before the Russo-German war broke out I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the guest of a Harvard professor. --Maurice Hindus, Hitler Cannot Conquer Russia (1940, 1941)

I was an eyewitness of three epochal stages of the history of Czechoslovakia. --Maurice Hindus, We Shall Live Again (1939)

September and October are said to be the worst months of the year in Leningrad. --Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution (1958)

At ten minutes past eleven our Light Cavalry Brigade advanced…. --Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (1975)

One stifling October day in 1930, at a party in Bombay, I ran into the crown prince of Afghanistan. --William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years 1930-1940 (1984)

Our long months of preparation and planning for the greatest amphibious operation in history ended on D-Day, June 6, 1944. --Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (1953)

Earlier volumes have led us to the point where the aggressors, both in Europe and Asia, had been driven to the defensive. --Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 5, Closing the Ring (1951)

This new year of the Second World War, 1942, opened upon us in an entirely different shape for Britain. We were no longer alone. --Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (1950)

Looking back on the unceasing tumult of the war, I cannot recall any period when its stresses and the onset of so many problems all at once or in rapid succession bore more directly on me and my colleagues than the first half of 1941.

Now at last the slowly gathered, long-pent-up fury of the storm broke upon us. Four or five millions of men met each other in the first shock of the most merciless of all the wars of which record has been kept. --Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (1949)

After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in the world. --Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm (1948)

In the Allied Headquarters at Reims, Field Marshal Jodl signed the instrument of German surrender on May 7, 1945. At midnight the next day there ended, in Europe, a conflict that had been raging since September 1, 1939. --Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe. (1948)

London, Wednesday, July 8, 1942. Ike says I’m to keep a diary. Have never kept one, so this is a new job. But everything is new, including dictation into a Dictaphone, so might as well get started.

As the plane buzzed over our jeep, its pilot pulled up on the nose and banked steeply over the bay where the Mediterranean dozed peacefully on the north Sicilian shore. --Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier’s Story (1951)

North Africa. October 29, 1942. I am sending this back by Captain Gordon Hutchins of this ship, the Augusta. By the time it reaches home, everything that has happened will be in the papers. --George S. Patton, Jr., War as I Knew It. (1947)

On the 10th May, 1940, Hitler launched his long-expected invasion of the West. On the eve of the attack, during the last tense hours of preparation, Rommel wrote this brief letter to his wife, and then takes up the narrative: 9 May 1940 Dearest Lu, We’re packing up at last. Let’s not hope

I was born in London, in St. Mark’s Vicarage, Kennington Oval, on 17th November 1887. Sir Winston Churchill in the first volume of Marlborough, His Life and Times wrote thus about the unhappy childhood of some men: “The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur

I scraped the last of the rice from my mess kit and looked out across the little clearing. My aides, Major Johnny Pugh and Captain Tom Dooley, were walking up to the battered trailer that served as my headquarters on Bataan.

“So help us, God--there goes a soldier!” It was a hard-boiled top sergeant who muttered this truism as General Douglas MacArthur issued orders to his troops going to the battlefront in World War II. --Francis Trevelyan Miller, General Douglas MacArthur Fighter for Freedom (1942)

When George Marshall was a boy in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, his biggest ambition was to own a dog. --Leonard Mosley, Marshall Hero for Our Times. (1982)

When on September 3rd, 1939, Britain, carrying with her a deeply divided and hesitant France, met Hitler’s invasion of Poland by war, the bulk of her battle fleet had been rearmed against air attack and the first of the great ships laid down in 1936 was within a year of completion.

It did not seem a night for revolution. At 6 p.m. the rain had set in, driving the furious gusts across the Tyrrhenian Sea, soaking the men in their gleaming black capes as they crouched on straw before guttering fires. Yet on this October night in 1922, beyond the hills that cradled Rome,

When any Occidental wishes to arrive at a correct and realistic estimate of China, and her problems as they exist today, with the object of comparing them with thee conditions that obtain in occidental countries throughout the world, one important

A Quote for the Day All my life I have thought of France in a certain way. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. --Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs: The Call to Honour 1940-1942. (1955)

“Middle-class! I’ve no patience!” said Miss Ammah, with her nose nearly horizontal. --Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, Odd of Even? (1908) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #262]

The evening before Helen Jeffrey’s wedding day, the whole household at the rectory came out to the garden. --Margaret Deland, John Ward, Preacher (1888) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #263]

Man’s inclination to decorate his belongings has always been one of the earliest signs of civilisation. --Dolores Bacon, Pictures That Every Child Should Know (1909) [Belle Waterbury Wood Collection #214]