War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

The United States never lost a war or won a conference.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‚hopey changey stuff,‘ she was right: there was nothing there.

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

If the experiments which I urge be defective, it cannot be difficult to show the defects; but if valid, then by proving the theory, they must render all objections invalid.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

You can think of the entire Internet as a place where ideas embodied in cyberspace are having a war, and it’s not much different than the war of gods in heaven, which has been taking place since there’s been human beings.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

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

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

The point – the power to hurt – of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

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.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

I sleep people. I put people unconscious. I’m stating facts.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Organized murder is war, and though we demonstrate against a particular war, the nuclear, or any other kind of war, we have never demonstrated against war.

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

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.

The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

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

Man is a universe within himself.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

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

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

The sinews of war are infinite money.

Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.