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

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

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

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

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.

Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

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

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

You can’t trust very many people.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

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.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

In war there is no prize for runner-up.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

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.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

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.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

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

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.