Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.
No Big Power in all history ever thought of itself as an aggressor. That is still true today.
Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct - how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best mo...
I have to say I wasn't a huge fan of 'Star Wars', and I'm still not, really, but you have to acknowledge that there's a huge fan base for it, and these people are really sweet. You can't stereotype a 'Star Wars' fan.
'Star Wars' is such a phenomenal global supernova that anything that gets said about it becomes kind of fact and gospel, and then taken by the legions of fans who are so excited to have more 'Star Wars,' that they roll off on all sorts of flights of ...
What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surren...
Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace buil...
Toward the end of the Second World War, a new consciousness arose amongst the public and policy makers of the Western World. After ten years of crippling economic depression and another five at war, the public demanded something new from their disint...
I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing...
I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.
I think you can go back in history and look at what the effect in Asia and the world was of a divided, fractured China from, you know, the opium wars through the Chinese civil war, and I don't think it was pretty for Asia or the world.
I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.
The war we are fighting today against terrorism is a multifaceted fight. We have to use every tool in our toolkit to wage this war - diplomacy, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and of course, military power - and we are developing new tools as...
People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people's powers of resistance.
Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably hav...
What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war a...
I've become very, very liberal as far as war is concerned. It's just too terrible. I've been to wars and I've seen what happens. I know what it is to be hurt, and it's nothing compared to these guys. To be blind for the rest of your life. To have pro...
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, '...
Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or ...
