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States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed, united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous application of liberty and tomato-sauce; violence is the instrument of national movements.

— Lewis Namier

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More quotes by Lewis Namier

Too much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft.

I have always maintained that British history in the eighteenth century is primarily a history of country houses.

Churchill alone, month after month and year after year, exposed the growing dangers of the international situation, pleaded for a consistent and active European policy, and pressed for re-armament on an adequate scale.

The League was to cure humanity and lead it into better ways. It was an expression of the morality and idealism of the Anglo-Saxons, and of their ignorance of what it means to suffer of neighbours and disputed borderlands (Ulster alone knows it).

[O]n a careful inquiry it will be found that the coming in of American wheat has wrought a greater change in the composition of the British House of Commons than the first two Reform Acts.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis Namier (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.