Source: Barbarian Sentiments - How The American Century Ends (1989), Chapter 5, Nationalism, p. 138.
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”
“It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.”
Declarations of Independence: Cross-examining American Ideology (HarperCollins, 1990), Ch. 5, p. 105
Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 11 “Self-Distraction is Self-Destruction” (p. 325)
“The only certainty in war is human suffering, uncertain costs, unintended consequences.”
Remarks by the President on the Iran Nuclear Deal at American University in Washington, D.C. (August 05, 2015) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/08/05/remarks-president-iran-nuclear-deal
2015
“War was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 2.
Speech to the US Congress (26 July 1994)
Context: I, serial number 30743, Lieutenant General in reserves Yitzhak Rabin, a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces and in the army of peace, I, who have sent armies into fire and soldiers to their death, say today: We sail onto a war which has no casualties, no wounded, no blood nor suffering. It is the only war which is a pleasure to participate in — the war for peace.
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (2012)
Context: Are we not still guilty, if to a less violent degree, of recklessness, of improvidence with regard to our future and our humanity? War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.
Source: The Obstacle Race (1979), Chapter VII: The Disappearing Oeuvre (p. 134)
Context: Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse.
“Peace won by compromise is usually a short lived achievement.”
As quoted in The Iron Man of India (1951) by S. Jaysbee, p. 57
