The State has no higher purpose than the protection of its interests. — Emil Ludwig

"And so the Emperor-King, in his oath, had sworn only to his own actual authority to decide all vital national questions “to the best of his ability”—and on what other principle does any reasonable human being proceed? None the less he remained, whatever the consequences, inviolable, unindictable, or, as it was expressed in other German National Constitutions, “hallowed.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Old and the New Worlds, there was—besides the Tsar and the Sultan—no one who possessed such authority as William the Second."

"Bismarck was an oppression on the realm. For a decade no political intelligence had dared to raise its head, unless prepared to defy him; thus the best brains in the Opposition were repressed, instead of ripening to potential authority. No official could develop under his rule, for all feared him who drew all things into his orbit, and decreed. Justly could the young Emperor say: “I have no Ministers; they are all Prince Bismarck’s Ministers.”"

"Only by the universal propaganda of lies were they ever goaded into hate—not for trade-rivalry nor race-antagonism, not material nor moral causes, made this Cabinet War a necessity in any one of the European States. The life-blood of ten millions of her sons was shed by Europe, not under any “tragic necessity,” nor through any “fatal concatenation” of circumstances; the sacrifice was extorted from her only by her wrangling statesman."

"The responsibility of the Sovereign was supreme, and as a consequence the whole extent of the various failures, or even the final defeat, is primarily attributable to him."

"The instability to which he was victim had flung him from the arms of one national group into another, and then back to the first; and all the time that he was treacherously playing off one enemy against the other, he was but drawing the two together. Since he would always do everything himself, and spoke the decisive word in all great national affairs, he bore and bears the responsibility for Germany’s isolation and encirclement in the decade immediately before the World-War. Never, but for William’s provocations, would Edward VII and his people have joined the enemies of Germany. The security of the German Empire was offered up on the altar of the Emperor’s nervous temperament."

"Debate is the death of conversation."