Jasper Fforde Quotes

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

Today, we have a powerful military that serves as a deterrent, but the enemy we have today is not like World War II, where you sign a piece of paper and the war is over. Today they're not in uniform. In my time we knew what the enemy looked like, we knew his weapons systems and such. Today, your cab driver may be the person, you have no idea. I don't know how we got into this fix, but we're there.

The pictures that were coming from Vietnam were showing us what was really happening on the ground level. It was in contradiction to what our political and military leaders were telling us. They were straight forward documentary images. A powerful indictment of the war, of how cruel and unjust it was. When I finally decided what to do with my life, it was to follow in that tradition.

In some ways, certain books are more powerful by far than any battle.

As a military man who has given half a century of active service I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions they have generated. There are powerful voices around the world who still give credence to the old Roman precept - if you desire peace, prepare for war. This is absolute nuclear nonsense.

As the excited passions of hostile people are of themselves a powerful enemy, both the general and his government should use their best efforts to allay them.

I think that President [Dwight] Eisenhower was... did the most marvelous job in the war, not really a military job: a public relations job, and it was essential that there should be a public relations job done in the post that he had.

Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

We don't want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don't see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn't go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.

There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.

Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict.

For in this modern world, the instruments of warfare are not solely for waging war. Far more importantly, they are the means for controlling peace. Naval officers must therefore understand not only how to fight a war, but how to use the tremendous power which they operate to sustain a world of liberty and justice, without unleashing the powerful instruments of destruction and chaos that they have at their command.

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the money touch, but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

In this war, which was total in every sense of the word, we have seen many great changes in military science. It seems to me that not the least of these was the development of psychological warfare as a specific and effective weapon.

Conservative and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultrarich and major corporations, and all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery, and eliminating all viable public spheres - whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation or any other aspect of a formative culture that addresses the needs of the common good.

So it's not a matter of the military lying to the press, but it's the job of the military to deny the press any information that will provide aid and comfort to the enemy.

No sane man is unafraid in battle, but discipline produces in him a form of vicarious courage.

I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody. I sure as hell don't want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our Internet.

I have never met anyone who built a bomb shelter and felt protected by it. I have never met a modern military man who did not realize that military victory is a concept which became obsolete with the coming of the nuclear age, and most civilians realize this also. Wisdom demands that we stop preparing to wage a war which would eliminate mankind - and start preparing to eliminate the seeds of war.

It's always intrigued me that amidst the group called slaves there were individuals who were extremely able, who were extremely colorful, who were powerful personalities, who by no means fit the usual images of slaves. They were people who, through their personalities and abilities, were very respected in the community where they lived by both black and white.

Artillery is the god of war.

The hardest thing of all for a soldier is to retreat.

In making tactical dispositions, the highest pitch you can attain is to conceal them.

To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, an alert citizenry today should take the trouble to learn how easy it can be for a powerful minority to manipulate information to win the support-or the indifference-of the majority towards an action.