I once heard it solemnly stated at an after-dinner debate in some literary club that a certain very prominent German statesman had a daughter at school in England, and that future friendly relations between the two countries were improved in prospect, if not assured, by that circumstance.

You think I am laughing; I am recording a fact, and the men present were politicians and statesmen as well as literary dilettanti.

It was an insular lack of insight that worked the mischief, or some of the mischief.

We, in Hungary, we live too much cheek by jowl with our racial neighbours to have many illusions about them.

Austrians, Roumanians, Serbs, Italians, Czechs, we know what they think of us, and we know what to think of them, we know what we want in the world, and we know what they want; that knowledge does not send us flying at each other's throats, but it does keep us from growing soft.
Ah, the British lion was in a hurry to inaugurate the Millennium and to lie down gracefully with the lamb.