Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Most kids don't get to go their parents' wedding.

I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives their creativity.

How do you tell troops who volunteered to fight for our freedoms that the country they fought for won't take care of them when they come back? In the time of war our troops and their families are supposed to be our number one priority.

No one has the right to ignite a war and lead an occupation and armies to conquer people invading them and make them suffer all kinds of torture murder expulsion displacement bombing and terrorism by different lethal prohibited weapons and then come and speak as the savior of the people or a defender of their rights.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

We had four years of world war which the peoples endured only because they were told that their sufferings would free humanity forever from the scourge of war.

You should be careful what you wish for as the reasons for war get confused. One person can be very clear in their motives but others can have different agendas.

The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians bureaucrats policemen and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.

Everything everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

World War II the atomic bomb the Cold War made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

Our strategy is one of preventing war by making it self-evident to our enemies that they're going to get their clocks cleaned if they start one.

I think the record speaks for itself. These are two individuals who have been for the war when the headlines were good and against it when their poll ratings were bad.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft no new taxes no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.

The political object is the goal war is the means of reaching it and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.

We never had planned to hijack a ship. We never thought of any war plans outside the Palestinian lands. We wished that the program had not failed and then the warriors could have achieved their goals.

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.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift.

There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops no matter how mistaken the war.

We managed to put together a compilation that had some creativity to it. In the meantime I was listening to the free radio stations and I noticed that during their war coverage they were playing these songs born out of the Vietnam War that were all critical of the soldiers.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.