“I don't think we are ever prepared for the level of warfare at which ignorance fights.”

"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

A Tramp Abroad (1880)
Context: You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does -- but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use.

Comment mentioning his work on The Thin Red Line.
The Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: I am at the moment trying to write a novel, a combat novel, which, in addition to being a work which tells the truth about warfare as I saw it, would free all these young men from the horseshit which has been engrained in them by my generation. I don't think that combat has ever been written about truthfully; it has always been described in terms of bravery and cowardice. I won't even accept these words as terms of human reference any more. And anyway, hell, they don't even apply to what, in actual fact, modern warfare has become.

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool (1 October 1968), quoted in The Times (2 October 1968), p. 4
Prime Minister

14 May 1928
1920s

Source: The Rise of the Hotel Dumort

[In response to the question "Do you think that you underestimated the insurgency's strength?"] Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize Luncheon http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060619-10.html, June 19, 2006
2000s, 2006