Maurice Cowling: Quotes about war

Maurice Cowling was historian. Explore interesting quotes on war.

Maurice Cowling: 16 quotes0 likes

“From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans.”

Maurice Cowling

Mill and Liberalism: Second Edition (CUP, 1990), p. xv.

“It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939…from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.”

Maurice Cowling

Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (Quartet Books, 1990), p. 144.

“If there is a class war—and there is—it is important that it should be handled with subtlety and skill. … it is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.”

Maurice Cowling

"The Present Position," Conservative Essays (Cassell, 1978), p. 1, p. 9.