Failure Quote by John Keegan

“On the twelfth of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began--that is, an event took place contrary…

— Leo Tolstoy

“The train, I was later told by my mother, only had about ten carriages to it, and there were hundreds of people fighting to…

— Alfred Nestor

“In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power.…

— Adam Hochschild

“They were twelve days in which world history wavered between two courses and the Germans came so close to victory that they reached out…

— Barbara W. Tuchman

“Ill-advisedly, the western Allies, following the defeat of Germany in World War I, sought to punish and degrade their adversary rather than rebuilding the…

— Charles River Editors

“So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many…

— Adam Hochschild

“We thought that not only would Germany come out of the war defeated, but Russia too. Things have turned out rather differently. In today's…

— Jerzy Andrzejewski

The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. [...] The objective of this battle must be the…

— Franz Halder

“In the last days before the attack a strange feeling, not so much of confidence as of fatalism, pervaded the German tank forces- if…

— Alan Clark

“For Reuter, it was the last act of the Great War and something which reduced, if it did not remove, the shame of defeat…

— Andrew Marr

“August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.”

— Franz Kafka

“We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was…

— Paul Graham