Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are so… - Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon

It is a grave matter that a treaty should be broken or arbitrarily set aside; it is still graver when the idea of the sanctity of treaties being the foundation of peace is considered so chimerical that no one who upholds it can be honest, and that resentment at the breach of a treaty must necessarily be pretence and hypocrisy. That all this is of bad augury for the future of Europe is certain.

If there is one thing more than another that I have striven to secure during the last seven years it is that we should not incur any increase of Imperial liabilities.

I never had any qualm of conscience as to my motives and intentions before the war. I used to torture myself by questioning whether by more foresight or wisdom I could have prevented the war, but I have come to think that no human individual could have prevented it. Nothing could have prevented it except a change of the Prussian nature.