Philip Gourevitch Quotes
I'm not pro-war. But I think war has been the dominant condition of humankind, and peace has been the anomaly - certainly sustained periods of peace that profit great masses of people - and I think war has worked, even awful hellish wars: worked to staunch fascist aggression in Europe, worked to preserve the Union after secession in the United States, etc. Not always, maybe not often, but to say never is to reject history in favor of a wishful unreality.
Gourevitch, Philip. Comment on "I am Philip Gourevitch, longtime New Yorker staff writer and author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. AMA." Reddit, 23 July 2015.
This seems to be the origin of the notion that democracies and republics are less likely to war with others than monarchies or dictatorships.
Philip Gourevitch (born 1961), an American author and journalist, is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review. His most recent book is The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), an account of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison under the American occupation. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
