From the beginning, the placement of [Clarence] Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means. ...The full story of his confirmation raises questions not only about who lied and why, but, more important, about what happens when politics becomes total war and the truth--and those who tell it--are merely unfortunate sacrifices on the way to winning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The chief lesson of the Depression should never be forgotten. Even our liberty-loving American people will sacrifice their freedom... and their democratic principles if their security and their very lives are threatened by another breakdown of our free enterprise system. We can no more afford another general depression than we can afford another total war, if democracy is to survive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a theater strategist, Lee often demonstrated more brilliance and apparent originality than Grant, but his most audacious plans ...were as much the product of the Confederacy's inferior military position as his own fine mind. In war the weaker side has to improvise brilliantly. It must strike quickly, daringly, and include a dangerous element of risk in its plans. Had Lee been a Northern general with Northern resources behind him, he would have improvised less and seemed less bold. Had Grant been a Southern general, he would have fought as Lee did. Fundamentally Grant was superior to Lee because in a modern total war he had a modern mind, and Lee did not. Lee looked to the past in war as the Confederacy did in spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If for Americans, at least, the Great War could sometimes be imagined as a brief, quasi-athletic lark, the Second War permitted no... such melioration by the spirit of adolescent optimism. In North Africa alone, the 1st Infantry Division spent more time in mortal contact with the enemy than all the time it spent--forming up, marching, drawing equipment, lining up at the mess hall, training, bitching--in all of the First World War. And on December 7, 1941, the American navy lost in one day more men killed--2008, to be exact--than in all the days of the earlier war. The Second World War, total and global as it was, killed worldwide, more civilian men, women, and children than soldiers, sailors, and airmen. And compared with the idiocies of Verdun, Gallipoli, or Tannenberg, it was indescribably cruel and insane. It was not until the Second World War had enacted all its madness that one could realize how near Victorian social and ethical norms the First World War really was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of re...suming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact alone that both, like Chatham before them, were great war ministers, links their names inseparably. Beyond that, they sha...red many qualities in common: unquenchable vitality, restless energy, personal magnetism, and an inspiring power of oratory. They were alike also in their defects: opportunism, total lack of consideration for others, and a degree of egotism that can only be termed infantile. Lloyd George, however, whom Lord Haldane once called "an illiterate with an unbalanced mind," lacked both the versatility and the intellectual power of Churchill. Where Sir Winston found relaxation in Macauley or Gibbon, Lloyd George in his prime amused himself with cheap detective fiction. The latter, cast in an inferior mold, lacked also the personal courage of his younger colleague and successor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, n...either shall they learn war any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Co...ngress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »