Daniel Handler Quotes

In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.

The Bible does not isolate war, as if it were something separate and unique and quite apart, as we tend to do in our thinking. It is but one of the manifestations of sin, one of the consequences of sin.

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

In the old fairy tales, often a 'moral' was tacked on at the end of the story - say, if a book was going to be marketed to young readers. And the morals don't really suit the stories at all, which makes them super weird - part of why I love the tradition so much. I do play with this, though I am more concerned with ethics than morals.

There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.

If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life. Of those recorded by historians few incidents have been attended with such circumstances as to excite in any high degree this sympathetic emotion of virtue. We are, therefore, wisely framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage. The spacious field of imagination is thus laid open to our use, and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the heart every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.

A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminatingly murderous.

Generals make plans. Plans go wrong. And soldiers die.

History does have a moral.

History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes

History is the unfolding of miscalculations

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.

Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything, I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The Ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more disputes in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.

At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

Novels do not force their fair readers to sin, they only instruct them how to sin; the consequences of which are fully detailed, and not in a way calculated to seduce any but weak but weak minds; few of their heroines are happily disposed of.