Italian girl in Adrian helmet, fur coat, and with a Vetterli Vitali rifle with bayonet during World War One.

Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?

- Gustave Le Bon

Battle of Osijek.

On Valentine's Day of 1884, just 36 hours after the birth of their only daughter, Alice, 25-year-old future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt held his young wife in his arms as she passed away from undiagnosed Bright's disease. Incredibly, just hours before, in the same house, he had already said a final goodbye to his mother, Martha. She had succumbed to Typhoid, aged just 48.

Theodore's diary for that day read as follows.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

- Jack Kerouac

Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness.

— Gustave Le Bon

"Don't even listen to a historian if he or she doesn't have a point of view. None of us are blank slates. None of us can just 'tell it how it was.'"

David Blight, in the introduction to the Yale Civil War Course