History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt’s time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it’s different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history.

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

London is a roost for every bird.

Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‚among the most unspeakable crimes in history.‘ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – meaning primarily the United States – come down to two fundamental issues: ‚What are the accepted and applicable ‚rules of world order,‘ and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?‘

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

In time of war the laws are silent.

In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also.

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.