17 quotes
Winston Churchill led the life that many men would love to live. He survived 50 gunfights and drank 20,000 bottles of champagne.
Churchill’s Finest Hour (2009)
France showed as a nation less strength than Churchill showed as a man.
Churchill’s Finest Hour (2009)
When the Soviets faced these two leaders of shared purpose and conviction, they faced their worst-case scenario: a moral-political meta-power.
Freedom's Men: The Cold War Team of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan (2005)
The flaw in the work is the flaw in the man.
His Long War: E Howard Hunt's American Spy (2007)
The history of the CIA brims with inquiries that cowed our spies and ruined their careers.
Watching the Watchmen: The CIA’s investigation of its own inspector general is perfectly legitimate (2007)
Appearance is not reality, except in Washington.
Watching the Watchmen: The CIA’s investigation of its own inspector general is perfectly legitimate (2007)
Every time there's a major intelligence failure there's talk about a makeover. But, every time there's talk about a makeover, it's transmuted into warnings about a takeover.
Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)
Many good writers, from Montaigne to Mencken, have been impolitic, colicky, or sassy.
Jesus, Jews and the Shoah: A Moral Reckoning by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (2003)
A Moral Reckoning is, among its other faults, a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners. Reading it is like listening for three days to Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe.
Jesus, Jews and the Shoah: A Moral Reckoning by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (2003)
Goldhagen does not say it, but one has the sense that he would affix, to every Christian Bible, the warning label: "This text contains hate speech."
Jesus, Jews and the Shoah: A Moral Reckoning by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (2003)
We are what we think. To change how people act, we must change what they believe.
His Long War: E Howard Hunt's American Spy (2007)
Perhaps most surprisingly, the papers show that that, as late as 1984, the pope did not believe the Communist Polish government could be changed.
Freedom's Men: The Cold War Team of Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan (2005)
Military intelligence officers cannot afford to be celebrators of diversity, Utopians, game-theorists, apostles of negotiation, or purveyors of the idea that the Internet will bring us all together.
Litany of Blunders (2007)
Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks.
Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)
The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military’s motives.
Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)
The Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer’s Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to stop blaming their bad choices on the gods.
Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)
Everyone acknowledges that people come to the evidence with different preconceptions. But we can't go into these problems assuming that the civilian bias, which tends toward arms control, and the view that everyone is rational, is necessarily more appropriate than the military bias. That needs to be argued, not just assumed.
Rumsfeld’s New Spy Unit (2002)