Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
The only driver stronger than an economic argument to do something is the war argument, the I-don't-want-to-die argument.
Tyson, Neil deGrasse. Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
McClellan liked to parade and drill his troops but not fight them. Lincoln wanted him to take the offensive but he always found an excuse not to. Many historians believe that McClellan wanted the war to end, the South to rejoin the Union and be allowed to maintain slavery. Others feel that he was just a military man who maintained his popularity by minimizing casualties. Finally, Lincoln fired McLellan and the complexion of the war changed thereafter. McClellan ran against Lincoln for the Presidency in 1864. . See {633922}
This is similar to proverbs in many other cultures.
The Ottoman Turks made the great mistake of allying themselves with Germany in WWI. At the end of the war, most of the Ottoman Empire in was stripped from Turkey by the terms of the peace treaty, corruption was rampant, and Turkey was culturally, scientifically, and economically quite backward and the nation was further hampered by Islamic Fundamentalism. The nation as they envisioned it at the time did not survive. Soon Demal and the other Young Turks were unseated in the almost bloodless revolution of Ataturk who then made the nation secular, modernized it and triggered the development that makes it the most modern and powerful Islamic country in the world, and a major economic and military power in the world.
He was a realist who foresaw that even though the South had been militarily defeated, there were those who would persist in their efforts to retain slavery or a de facto form where freedom is the form but subjugation was the substance. It would be Jim Crowe and terrorism in the form of the KKK and a successor to Lincoln who was very sympathetic to the aims and culture of the Southern Rebels.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author, and science communicator.
