Empowering friends, picking your battles, always checking principle with prudence, never overestimating American capacities, but never overestimating the enemy’s strength: this is best seen not as a strategy for all contingencies but as a disposition, a habit of mind, a temperament.

Michael Ignatieff on George Kennan's approach to US foreign policy, America's Melancholic Hero (The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014).

In short, the key to the salvation of the West was the Persian defeat by the Greeks, which required a victory at Salamis, which in turn could not have occurred without the repeated efforts—all against opposition—of a single Athenian statesman. Had he wavered, had he been killed, or had he lacked the moral and intellectual force to press home his arguments, it is likely that Greece would have become a satrapy of Persia.

Victor Davis Hanson on Themistocles in “No Glory That Was Greece” in What If?, edited by Robert Cowley