“Since World War II there has been a growing heedlessness. You dated it, in the case of Britain, from about 1910 and I think quite rightly so. And the developments that led to War World I were a part of the decadence of the time, because very few when they went to war in that war had any recognition of what they were doing to civilization. And we came out of it. We went into it under the illusion that we were going to make the world safe for democracy. Our president Woodrow Wilson with his diplomacy was going to be the world messiah. And that term was applied to him. Well, we have only increased in our departure from a realistic assessment of things, from having any vision. And, of course, Proverbs tells us where there is no vision the people perish. And by vision it means a knowledge of what God’s reality is. And more literally the second part is the people perish, the people run naked. They are crazy. They are wild. So, lacking that vision, the people have been running wild. They have been running naked all over the world”

The Progressive interview (2010)
Context: There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of the utopias that people were trying to construct, namely the Soviet Union, threw out a writer called Zamyatin who wrote a seminal book called We, which contains the seeds of Orwell and Huxley. Writers started doing dystopias after we saw the effects of trying to build utopias that required, unfortunately, the elimination of a lot of people before you could get to the perfect point, which never arrived. … I don’t believe in a perfect world. I don’t believe it’s achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.

1990s, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)

My Service Before The War, p. 56
Vokes - My Story (1985)

quote, 1930
As quoted in Kurt Schwitters, das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, Dumont Cologne, 1973 – 1981, Vol. 5, p. 335.
1930s

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 152

At the 130th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Naval Institute and Annapolis Naval History Symposium on 31 March 2004. http://www.usni.org/seminars/annualmeeting/04/annualmeeting04Lehman.htm, http://www.johnflehman.com/pdf/proceedings_MAR2004.pdf (PFD)

"Waiting for the Miracle" (co-written with Sharon Robinson)
The Future (1992)
Context: Waiting for the miracle
There's nothing left to do.
I haven't been this happy
since the end of World War II.

2015-09-16
CNN REAGAN LIBRARY DEBATE: Later Debate Full Transcript
CNN
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/09/16/cnn-reagan-library-debate-later-debate-full-transcript/
2010s

Source: From the Danube to the Yalu (1954), p. 493
Context: World War II was an era in which America came of age as a world power. We had and we still have many lessons to learn. It was not surprising, perhaps, that we celebrated a victory when in reality we had not won the war. We had stopped too soon. We had been too eager to go home. We welcomed the peace, but after more years of effort and expenditure we found that we had won no peace.