There's a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, 'Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don't have to worry about these guys again.' We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, ...
I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.
On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, b...
One of the problems we currently have is there hasn't been in the population any serious engagement with the ethics of war because we have an all-volunteer army. I would think the return to the draft would be an intervention that would require discus...
It is truly vital for the United States to assure that it is not attacked with weapons of mass destruction; to prevent wars in other countries from spreading onto American soil; and to maintain access to global sea lanes on which our economy depends....
I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.
One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing ...
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
Success in war underpins the claims to greatness of many presidents.
Die Sache mit dem Sündenbock funktionierte wirklich, als noch religiöse Kraft dahinterstand. Man lud dem Ziegenbock die Sünden der Stadt auf und trieb ihn hinaus, und die Stadt war gereinigt. Es funktionierte, weil alle, einschließlich der Götte...
Violence is itself a form of political mobilisation. It is mainly directed against civilians and not at another army. The aim is to capture territory through political control rather than through military success. And political control is maintained ...
I do not think that illegal plunder, such as theft or swindling — which the penal code defines, anticipates, and punishes — can be called socialism. It is not this kind of plunder that systematically threatens the foundations of society. Anyway, ...
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war s...
I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organiz...
Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, inform...
[Anakin has been appointed onto the council, but denied mastership] Anakin Skywalker: I swear to you... I didn't ask to be put on the council. Obi-Wan Kenobi: But it's what you wanted. Your friendship with Chancellor Palpatine seems to have paid off....
I don't know yet. I might be. Age sixteen totally sucks when it comes to absolutes.
Because my life is empty window of nothingness punctuated by meaningless details of totally mundane non-events.
…It was like he waved his magic wang, and I totally forgot how I’m not a gullible teenager anymore.
A total stranger, and one not of one's sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.
We have work to do if you are not to be a total failure like high-waisted, acid-wash jeans.
