May the pens of the diplomats not undo what we have won with the sword!

Toast at Wellington's banquet in honour of the surrender of Paris, a few days afterward (July 1815). Reported in Edwin Emerson, A History of the Nineteenth Century Year by Year, vol. 1 (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1902), p. 589. Slightly different version in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 14th ed. (1968), p. 469: "May the pens of the diplomats not ruin again what the people have attained with such exertions."