Evelyn Waugh Quotes
Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
Waugh, Evelyn. Put Out More Flags. Chapman & Hall, 1942.
In the Middle East, counties have often made bad deals or embarked upon damaging policies in order to appear to be strong. In that part of the world there is a firm belief that showing any weakness at all will invite many different forces to go after you. Iran has this vision of Islamic world leadership and if they so not appear to be very strong and powerful to the Muslim world, their aspirations will have been for naught.
William the Conqueror. The King had come ashore and fell forward in the sand on his face and hands. Showing a sense of humor, he hade this statement. Shortly thereafter he took England militarily at Hastings and seized it politically.
Johansson is describing the origin of the word “hegemony.” During the 5th Century B.C. Athens and their allies formed the Delian League to combat the Persian Empire. Athens, as the most powerful city-state in Ancient Greece, controlled the alliance and the League soon turned into the Athenian “empire” or “hegemony.”
In early WWII, he opposed the Japanese military practice of killing conquered civilian people to instill fear and make them accept occupation. (In this case in occupied Indonesia). He was arrested by the military and sentenced to death, but he never was executed. Though not generally known, there were a number of Japanese who opposed the Japanese military policies and practices. He was one.
This was not the ravings of a right wing extremist. It was normative for Prussia as a whole. Right wing extremism as we think of it today was the norm of the ruling classes in Prussia and other parts of Germany. This book was a best seller in Germany. This quotation illustrates the mentality of the conservative, militarist, culture that dominated Germany at the time. The German aggression of WWI was not even considered as immoral but a God-given right.
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.
