The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

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

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

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.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

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

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

The truth of the matter is that Iran is a cancer.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

Contention does not usually begin as strife between countries. More often, it starts with an individual, for we can contend within ourselves over simple matters of right and wrong. From there, contention can infect neighbors and nations like a spreading sore.

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

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

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 principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

I will continue to believe that Israel’s security is paramount.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible.

I hope I’m wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy – worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.