Robert Dallek Quotes

I fought for peace in the fifties.

I don't think they knew very much about the war in Korea at all.

In contrast, Western historians, and those in South Korea, say the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950. Both sides agree that after the war began, the North Korean Army captured Seoul in three days and pushed as far south as Pusan before American troops arrived to drive back the North Koreans nearly as far north as the border to China.

I know that military alliances and armament have been the reliance for peace for centuries, but they do not produce peace; and when war comes, as it inevitably does under such conditions, these armaments and alliances but intensify and broaden the conflict.

We have won an armistice on a single battleground, not peace in the world. We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest.

Peacemaking and peacekeeping should run in parallel.

It’s damn easy to get into a war, but damned harder to extricate yourself once you get in.

As to Korea, there is no longer any real hope of a genuinely peaceful and free democratic development in that country. Its political life in the coming period is bound to be dominated by political immaturity and violence. Where such conditions prevail, the communists are in their element. Therefore, we cannot count on native Korean forces to help us hold the line against Soviet expansion

Americans have learned that it is harder to end wars than it is to begin them

I'm not aiming for the Nobel Peace Prize!

Humans are very aggressive and scrappy, and go to war at the drop of a hat. However, a standard land war is no longer going to work as it is no longer technically possible.

With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.

I'm not sure Americans are hesitant to do this again - to fight another war, because it looked to them like a courageous and terrific endeavor.

But I feel convinced, and I venture even to prophesy in this regard, that the time will come when there will also be a minister of peace in the cabinet, seated beside the ministers of war.

Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.

To my mind, what we ought to have maintained from the beginning was the strictest neutrality. If we had done this, I do not believe we would have been on the verge of war at the present time.

I guess if people couldn't profit from war I don't think there would be war.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

I think it's in the hands of each head of state: the future of peace in his own country.

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.

Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.