There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.
George W. Bush was a very bad president. The Iraq war was a big mistake. The U. S. A. needed a political change. I hoped Barack Obama could be a good president, but I'm disappointed. He hasn't done well.
Oh, the naive Obama State Department. They say we can't kill our way out of war. Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can't. They're dead. We killed 'em.
To thousands of elder women in the late sixties and early seventies [the private women's club movement] came like a new gospel ofactivity and service. They had reared their children and seen them take flight; moreover, they had fought through the war, their hearts in the field, their fingers plying needle and thread. They had been active in committees and commissions, the country over; had learned to work with and beside men, finding joy and companionship and inspiration in such work. How could they go back to the chimney-corner life of the fifties?
I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.
If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits
Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision, to the releasing of a trigger.
As one Israeli said, "It's a big mistake for Israel to say it 'won' the war, when there was no war. There were no battles. . . no military enemy in the field. "
I am not here to pass civilities or compliments with you, but on other business. I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them. . . and as I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.
History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U. S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.
When a lot of things are going the wrong way for a country, for a people, when you can't really think of anything worse than a war, you always try to take life on the brighter side and that's how I grew up with my parents.
We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.
Certainly people are always very envious of me. When I join a new theater company, the other actors look down the program, see my Return of the Jedi credit and say, 'Oh, you were part of Star Wars. ' I smile and say, 'Yes, but only for twenty-six and a half seconds. '
It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. . . . Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.
Terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society.
There is consequence of our forgetting who we are. Forgetting that we're able to create our environment, from our health to economy to war. Something can be done about everything we perceive as bad, if we so choose. If we are aware of the concept of compassion.
I wish that after the war against Saddam Hussein we had been more effective at rebuilding Iraq quickly. I think had we done it from the provinces, in, rather than from Baghdad, out, we might have been more successful.
I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted it for a minute.
This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.