Vansittart, Robert. Lessons of My Life 1943

Memoir of a member of the English foreign service, which displays all the virtues of the upper class educational system in England. Vansittart was born in the early 1880s. Likely he went into the foreign service before or after the 14/18 war. His book is an excellent view on the development of the political scene in Europe and the malevolent effect of the "Prussian" spirit (boastful in victory, seeming humble in defeat), both in German speaking lands, and in Europe.

5: Those who ask to be deceived must not grumble if they are satisfied

7: if we wish to get rid of the death penalty, "que messieurs les assassins commencent" (Alphonse Kerr)

8: I have always esteemed the humour of Punch to be a branch of our heavy industry

13: Everyone who has ever gone into partnership with Germany becomes first a sleeping partner, and then an office boy

20: We who have been losing the habits both of plain speaking and of profiting by experience

25: those whose sentiments are really prejudices

34: Nothing gives so clear an idea of infinity than human credulity

35: Germany has deprived the whole 20th Century of sharing the joy

37ff: on Laval's delivery of Austria to Germany by encouraging Mussolini in Abyssinia

42: a sense of humor, which means a sense of proportion

48: People who would not fight must compromise

77: the mouth opens too soon, and the mind not often enough

124: the old world has gone; it was fated by its sins of omission

125: (a totting up of the reparations swindle)

150: Balfour always seemed to me detached from any human activity

152: "Our two greatest poets, Goethe and Schiller, are totally lacking in humor". (Boerne 1830)

157: On German superiority in music (excepting the Dutch van Beethoven) and goes on and on about culture, ignoring the necessity of civilization

172: on the failure of the [state] church

174: In the 14/18 war, the Germans killed the idea of the progress [improvement] of man

‑‑‑: (Denigrating one's own country) is a strange form of righteousness, that in fear of self‑righteousness, takes refuge in slander ultimately revealed as self‑ righteousness after all.

176: I have said just enough to indicate that, in such handling, considerable changes of ritual, and some changes of doctrine, may be necessary

181: (on Niemoeller)

184: Luther returned to the feudal lords the spiritual powers which Charlemagne had taken from them

‑‑‑: German Protestantism: "a cold political party, a social institution"

192: So in his mercy God created pain / and all the ills by which our virtue lives

195: the greatest tragedy in history: fact killed by a theory

196: Lord Lothian had enough knowledge to be persuasively at fault

‑‑‑: on the Accidentalist theory of history ("if only...")

200: You cannot keep a man in indefinite training when pugilism is neither his taste nor his profession

‑‑‑: that nationalism did not develope by itself, but to fill a religious void. "Germanity"

206: "There are no simple and infallible rules of 'principle' and 'right' to determine foreign policy in a given situation (Prof. H. Carr)

209: The revolting textbooks, worse under Weimar than under Wilhelm II

210: In the German schools of his youth: no love of sport, only of fitness

211: religiosity, not religion

222: Fichte cleansed the system of Kant from all its inconsistent and humane elements

225: beginning to bray scientifically

229: "Habituation to certain sounds reaches deeply into character; one soon finds the words and phrases, and finally, even the thoughts that fit such sounds" (Nietzsche)

248: The success of the patter merchants in persuading others has been perhaps less remarkable than their success in persuading themselves

266: Talleyrand, on his death bed, to his doctor calling: "Tell him I am not well enough to see him"

267: "Sudetenland" is a Nazi confection, like the "North German peninsula"

268: (On Bismarck's spoliation of Denmark)

269: By timid language and a false love of peace, Germany is encouraged to believe that she can set treaties at defiance with impunity

281: I come to the final and all‑important lesson. Unless we can learn to think and feel in European terms, Europe will ultimately go her way without us. It is an utter impossibility to feel for Europe without feeling against Germany.