Max Boot Quotes


Sure we have smart bombs that can blow up any target in the world, but we don’t know which ones to blow up.


Citations

Max Boot, Historian & National Security Expert, Advocating more and better intelligence personnel, Lecture, San Diego Central Library, November 14, 2006

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

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George Washington was our first President. And he was the first President to complain about the quality of the foreign intelligence he was receiving.


Later, he felt that the offense had become almost invincible. See {626741}. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.


Max Boot
Max Boot
  • Born: September 12, 1969
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Writer, Historian

Max A. Boot is a Russian-American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. He has written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has also authored books of military history. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party" in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.