“It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.”

2005
Context: I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9-11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief.
With a huge gaping hole in lower Manhattan, I'm not sure why we have to keep reminding people, but we are at war. (Perhaps it's because of the media blackout on images of the 9-11 attack. We're not allowed to see those because seeing planes plowing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might make us feel angry and jingoistic.)
Among the things that war entails are: killing people (sometimes innocent), destroying buildings (sometimes innocent) and spying on people (sometimes innocent).
That is why war is a bad thing. But once a war starts, it is going to be finished one way or another, and I have a preference for it coming out one way rather than the other.

NBC interview (1987)

regarding Grand Princess cruise ship with 21 diagnosed cases of coronavirus

during tour of Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, , quoted in * 2020-03-06

Trump Says ‘People Have to Remain Calm’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

Peter Baker

New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-cdc.html
2020s, 2020, March

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.

Dress to Kill (1998)

Source: Translations, Monkey: Folk Novel of China (1942), Ch. 14 (p. 132)

November 8
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Source: Among Others

Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank, dies at 100 http://web.archive.org/web/20100113212438/news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100112/ap_on_re_eu/eu_netherlands_obit_miep_gies (January 12, 2010)