Forgetting about our mistakes and our wounds isn't enough to make them disappear.
The poets think about war more than the social scientists.
The great presidents never forget the principle of the republic and seek to preserve and enhance them – in the long run– without undermining the needs of the moment. Bad presidents simply do what is expedient, heedless of principles. But the worst presidents are those who adhere to the principles regardless of what the fortunes of the moment demand.
The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.
When I went to war, I did not go making geopolitical calculations. I went to war with a lust.
When you're young and going to war, it's a genuinely exciting moment. You are going to risk yourself. On the battlefield, you are suddenly free. You realize: I'm here, I'm in it. Exaltation. Suddenly you're hit by another extraordinary feeling: my God, I can be killed. And: will I embarrass myself? It's like you're in a kaleidoscope and all of these extraordinary feelings are zipping by.
I cannot understand how something as ubiquitous as war can simply be dismissed as pathological. It is not clear to me that it is an unspeakable evil. If it is, I need proof of it.
Once I start something, I always finish it. They had been trying to get X-Men made for 30 years and they thought maybe if I got involved, it might actually happen.
[When told that her grandchild had her nose:] I didn't get this nose until I was thirty-four.
Only very coarse persons wanted wars.
One of the problems with worry is that it keeps you from enjoying what you have.