Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive too innocent to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

As for charity it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned and the ultimate consequence to the general good are apt to be at complete war with one another.

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe having surveyed a few boxes full of letters diaries bank statements and photographs that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

So far as hypotheses are concerned let no one expect anything certain from astronomy which cannot furnish it lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

Violence does in truth recoil upon the violent and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.