"One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies."
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."
Albert Einstein on War"One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam."
Martin Luther King, Jr. on War"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."
Albert Einstein on War"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
Dwight D. Eisenhower on War"We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills we shall never surrender."
Winston Churchill on War"Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm."
"In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed."
"The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith."
"Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that."
"The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open."