We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
– Dwight David Eisenhower : 34th president of the United States, 1890-1969
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I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security – out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
– John Steinbeck: American novelist, Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962, 1902-1968
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The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force .
– Norman Cousins: American essayist and editor, long associated with the Saturday Review, 1912-1990
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Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.
– William Proxmire
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I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version.
– Oliver North
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To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.
– Edward R. Murrow
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Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth.
– Publius Cornelius Tacitus
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
– George Orwell : English novelist, essayist, and critic, 1903-1950
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A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen.
– James Madison: US fourth president, 1751-1836
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Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
– George Washington
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The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
– William Hazlitt
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I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.
– Admiral Gene LaRocque
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