“Well, if it’s naive to want peace instead of war, let ’em make sure they say I’m naive. Because I want peace instead of war. If they tell me they want war instead of peace.”

I don’t say they’re naive, I say they’re stupid. Stupid to an incredible degree to send young people out to kill other young people they don’t even know, who never did anybody any harm, never harmed them. That is the current system. I am naive? That’s insane.

People get discouraged. They should remember, from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged.

Look what’s happened to the same-sex marriages. To tell somebody a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man, and a man can marry a man, they would have said,

I prefer law to war under all circumstances.

What has happened here [aftermath of 9/11] is not war in its traditional sense. This is clearly a crime against humanity.

If it’s naive to want peace instead of war, let ’em make sure they say I’m naive. Because I want peace instead of war.

“You’re crazy.” But it’s a reality today. So the world is changing. And you shouldn’t – you know – be despairing because it’s never happened before. Nothing new ever happened before.

And I also learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.

Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task.

War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people.

I don’t think I’m an idealist. I’m a realist. And I see the progress. The progress has been remarkable. Look at the emancipation of woman in my lifetime. You’re sitting here as a female.

Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.

A good soldier, whether he leads a platoon or an army, is expected to look backward as well as forward; but he must think only forward.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

I’m never content with what I do. I live in a sort of permanent dissatisfaction. I think that’s the secret to doing things well.

I detest politics, to be honest with you. It’s a cesspool. And I don’t think I would fare well in that cesspool because I don’t believe in political correctness and I certainly don’t believe in dishonesty.

Oh, it’s always the same,’ she sighed, ‘if you want men to behave well to you, you must be beastly to them; if you treat them decently they make you suffer for it.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.