Annie Jacobsen Quotes

I started out as a Cold Warrior, even my last years in grade school.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.

If truth is the first victim of war, then read on - I've got some great lies for you this month.

The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.

Containment, as everyone will recall, was a rough plan for stopping the Communists any time they crossed a certain line dividing our half of the world from theirs.

That product of the human intelligence which we denominate the Campaign Lie, though it did not originate in the United States, has here attained a development unknown in other lands. It is the destiny of America to try all experiments and exhaust all follies. In the short space of seventy-seven years, we have exhausted the efficiency of falsehood uttered to keep a man out of office.

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.

So a lie told a million times becomes the truth.

And, gentlemen, they have not yet done so, and it is quite clear that no Americans, no people in the world probably, are going to war with the Soviet Union.

It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.

I think we're lied to about a number of things.

In the post war period I began again to have my doubts about Russian policy.

I think the Cold War works as a great analogy or simile for different kinds of conflict. It's funny, when you look back at it, it's one of the last times that the boundaries were clear. Now, as we see on 'Homeland,' there are no clear boundaries and enemies.

Even during the years of the Cold War, the intense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we always avoided any direct clash between our civilians and, most certainly, between our military.

I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version.

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

Half a truth is often a great lie.