William Safire Quotes

In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.

He that makes a good war makes a good peace.

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests.

We always prefer war on our own terms to peace on someone else's.

There have always been people during periods of history that thought that we could get along with the enemy if only we would reach out. Peace in our time is a philosophy.

I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.

Detente is a readiness to resolve differences and conflicts not by force, not by threats and sabre-rattling, but by peaceful means, at the conference table.

I will never sit down with Gerry Adams . . . he'd sit with anyone. He'd sit down with the devil. In fact, Adams does sit down with the devil.

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

Number one, that it is smart to communicate and negotiate with your enemy instead of just waging war with bombs and weapons of mass destruction.

Whatever efforts for peace President Gorbachev had in mind, they were pretty substantially undercut very swiftly by Saddam Hussein.

If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

Wishful thinking won't make the Palestinians an Israeli peace partner, no matter how much President Barack Obama pressures Israel to make concessions; caustically mocking Putin's worldview won't make it any less real or mitigate the Russian threat.

In any case, fighting will not settle whether the claims were just or unjust. It will only settle which nation can mobilize and handle its fighting forces and its economic forces the better.

If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

And we ought to work our diplomacy first and I think it's a reason it's going to respond increasingly to our diplomacy particularly with the president's direct involvement in the peace process, and I think that's extraordinarily important.

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Nevertheless, China was unfortunately unable to understand Japan's real position, and it is greatly to be regretted that the Sino-Japanese War became one of long duration.

To go to war, you must always think of, can you win?

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

Wars without military objectives have a tendency to go on forever.

No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it.