Margaret Stohl Quotes

I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.

There's nothing more political than fantasy.

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

Sci-fi works for me as a way of getting across a social conceit couched as entertainment. Social realist movies lost their way because they are just not that entertaining.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

Pat Buchanan likes to say we're in a culture war. The Civil War was a culture war, and brothers killed brothers. I wonder if they avoided dinner conversation about politics. What if this culture war turned into a real war? I'd look back on that dinner and wish that I'd ordered a side of argument

In order to function, the United States needs an enemy.

An extreme reflection of the dangers confronting modern social development is the growth of racism, nationalism, and militarism and, in particular, the rise of demagogic, hypocritical, and monstrously cruel dictatorial police regimes…. These tragic developments have always derived from the struggle of egotistical and group interests, the struggle for unlimited power, suppression of intellectual freedom, a spread of intellectually simplified, narrow-minded mass myths.

Perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

History teaches that the rise of new great powers often triggers major global conflict.

We did not have a military victory in the Cold War. It was a negotiated outcome that benefitted both sides…. Such claims of victory are all distortions, all incorrect, all misleading, and all dangerous to the safety and future prosperity of the American people.

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power

There can be no finality in politics.

It looks like the so-called "winners" of the Cold War are determined to have it all, and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone.

Let me speak for myself: The Russians are not our friends.

I love that vein which uses sci-fi to address society's problems. It is the same when you have useful nightmares - things morph, and you get to confront issues in your dreams.

Good sci-fi and fantasy use fantastical situations to represent real-life issues. It really is all a metaphor for what we all go through as humans.

I think the best science fiction, especially literature, is political in nature and is often an allegory about something problematic in our world, and it's something that makes the 'X-Men' comics so relevant - they're about xenophobia and prejudice.

Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress.

The thing that's interesting about science fiction is that it is always, when it is done well, a lens on our world. And yet it is a metaphor.

For thirty-five years, David Halberstam, an unsilent member of the Silent Generation, has contemplated America and its place in the world, casting his eye on big subjects - Vietnam, global economics, race, mass media, and the 1950s.