War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war.

War is the highest summit of human achievement; it is the natural, the final stage in the historical development of humanity.

War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface.

Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense, the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must flow without interruption somewhere or other on the globe, and that for every nation, peace is only a respite.

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.

It must be thoroughly understood that war is a necessity, and that the more readily we accept it, the less will be the ardor of our opponents, and that out of the greatest dangers communities and individuals acquire the greatest glory.

The importance of war and military institutions has been generally neglected in British historical writing, whose tone has been set by the Whig and liberal emphasis on peaceful constitutional progress. In this liberal view war appears as an aberration, an interruption of a "natural" condition of peace: almost as a form of delinquency unworthy of intellectual attention. The liberal, pacifistic view of history can only be maintained by resolute aversion of the gaze from the facts. For conflict between tribal or social groups and nations constitutes the essential human condition in the absence of a world-state with a monopoly of force. The relations between nation states have always been those of a struggle for advantage and domination, where friendships may indeed burgeon while interests temporarily coincide, but then again languish when those interests diverge. Peace and war in history flow continually in and out of each other, alternative aspects of the single phenomenon of the struggle for power. It is false and unrealistic therefore to divide policy between hard-and-fast categories of "peace" and "war". Policy may shade all the way from trade and diplomatic rivalry through indirect conflict and limited war to total war; the distinctions are of degree, not of kind

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

History is the unbroken march of struggle to advance humanity. Thus all struggles are connected, some more strongly than others.

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man.

War is the father of all and the king of all; it proves some people gods, and some people men; it makes some people slaves and some people free.

I wonder nowadays whether the neglect of military history and war does not have the effect of giving some people an anaemic and unreal idea of the deeper processes of mundane history. Indeed, it is possible that our conventional history-teaching underestimates the part played by war in the development of our civilisation and our economy, as well as in the rise of the modern state. It has been noted that great constitutional concessions were won from English kings who were usually unsuccessful in their foreign policy; and certainly it is not easy to know what would have happened if King John or Charles I or James II had been more fortunate in this field. Ranke thought that the disgrace suffered by the French monarchy in its foreign policy had much to do with the outbreak of the French Revolution.