“Even if military advantages were not to be had by deliberately limiting attack to counterforce targets, I suspect that most governments would still prefer to observe such limits. Almost nobody wants to go down in history as the first man to kill 100,000 people.”

2011, Address on interventions in Libya (March 2011)
Context: Innocent people were targeted for killing. Hospitals and ambulances were attacked. Journalists were arrested, sexually assaulted, and killed. Supplies of food and fuel were choked off. Water for hundreds of thousands of people in Misurata was shut off. Cities and towns were shelled, mosques were destroyed, and apartment buildings reduced to rubble. Military jets and helicopter gunships were unleashed upon people who had no means to defend themselves against assaults from the air.
Confronted by this brutal repression and a looming humanitarian crisis, I ordered warships into the Mediterranean. European allies declared their willingness to commit resources to stop the killing. The Libyan opposition and the Arab League appealed to the world to save lives in Libya. And so at my direction, America led an effort with our allies at the United Nations Security Council to pass a historic resolution that authorized a no-fly zone to stop the regime’s attacks from the air, and further authorized all necessary measures to protect the Libyan people.

November 1941 https://books.google.ca/books?id=eEcXfXoSdgwC&pg=PR223, according to page 223 of "The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945", a 2013 book by Richard Overy
2014 Washington Post article https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-bombers-and-the-bombed-allied-air-war-over-europe-1940-1945-by-richard-overy/2014/03/07/7c2ba5de-9d60-11e3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html refers to him as "a ranking British officer"
History Channel, between 5 November 2018 and 21 February 2019 https://web.archive.org/web/20190221193159/https://www.history.co.uk/shows/al-murray-why-does-everyone-hate-the-english/articles/the-bombing-of-german-cities-during-ww2, referred to him as "one bigwig at Bomber Command" when quoting this.
since at least 19 October 2017 https://steamcommunity.com/app/537800/discussions/0/3182216552766807678/ this quote has been misattributed to Charles Portal the "Chief of Air Staff", due to subsequent mention of Peirse's title "Chief of Bomber Command" mentioned in a 2015 Telegraph article https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11410633/Dresden-was-a-civilian-town-with-no-military-significance.-Why-did-we-burn-its-people.html following a paragraph naming Portal without mentioning the subsequent person was Peirse, allowing the assumption that it was continued discussion of Portal.

Dress to Kill (1998)

March 27, 1968, page 215.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Letter to Beatrice (29 September 1945), published in The Patton Papers (1996), edited by Martin Blumenson, Vol. 2 , p. 787

Source: Possible Side Effects

Comments on * Kudlow & Cramer
2005-02-07
Television
CNBC, as quoted in * Coulter: "Would that it were so! … That the American military were targeting journalists."
Media Matters for America
2005-02-10
http://mediamatters.org/research/200502100010
2005

1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989), Farewell Address (1989)
Context: I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 31 (p. 360)
Context: You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life’s pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with — no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.