Thor Heyerdahl Quotes
We must wake up to the insane reality of our time. We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available to people whose former battle axes and swords our ancestors condemned.
Heyerdahl, Thor. The Tigris Expedition: In Search of Our Beginnings. Doubleday, 1981, p. 331.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. His view was that the quality of statesmanship at the time was bellicose and imperialistic. We had annexed Puerto Rico and Cuba and then occupied the Philippines. He argued that if we did not have the bombastic and expansionist statesmen like McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, we would not need so much armament to back them up.
After the First World War, the United States and other countries were very conscious of the possibility of foreign arms sales encouraging and facilitating war and aggression. Therefore, arms shipments were very limited. The exception allowed tyrannical governments often to suppress, and often kill, their own citizens. By the end of the 20th century, the United States would sell arms to almost anyone and was the largest arms supplier in the world. Much of the flip flop of position on arms exports was caused by the fact that other nations were shipping arms and getting the jobs and profits associated with those exports and almost anyone in the world with money could buy arms. So the United States allowed its arms manufacturers to compete in this lucrative business to all but a few arms embargoed nations with whom we were having international difficulty.
Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany and geography.
