We would not have been the bastion of freedom we have been in the twentieth century.
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A
“He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things…but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing.”
Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 15 (p. 134)
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Robert Charles Wilson 134
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2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A
“He had thought his wars over. Now he realized peace had been merely a lull.”
Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 17 (p. 407)
"The Contest in America," Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862); later published in Dissertations and Discussions (1868), vol.1 p. 26
Context: War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 1, “Avillis” (p. 4)
“I hate war. It's terrible beyond imagination.”
2000s, 2008, (2008)
“Wars were not made by young men, he thought, yet they had to fight them.”
A Tradition of Victory, Cap 14 "The Toast is Victory!"