Great Throughts Treasury

"An ideal command system… should be able to gather information accurately, continuously, comprehensively, selectively, and fast. Reliable means must be developed to distinguish the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant, the material from the immaterial."

"As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide."

"The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose/lose situation. If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see there is simply no escape."

"The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of 'targets' to be destroyed one by one; but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting."

"?Never' is too much of a word. Nothing lasts forever."

"Assuming China does not become destabilized and continues to grow, it will no doubt develop a military program in proportion to its resources."

"Born out of civil war, originally the state was merely a machine for imposing peace and quiet. During the later years of the eighteenth century, though, it met with nationalism. In the hands of such people as the Swiss Baltheassar and the German Herder, nationalism started as a harmless nostalgia for one?s native customs which seemed about to be swept away by the universalism of the enlightenment; it was a cultural movement, not a political one. Later, though, it was usurped by the state which used it in order to fill in its own moral emptiness. Thus employed and, some would say, perverted, nationalism changed its spots, taking on a virulent, chauvinistic, and aggressive character. By providing a goal and a flag?it is with the aid of colored ribbons that men are led, as Napoleon said?nationalism enabled the state to assimilate the people. Channeling and focusing the latter?s energies, it harnessed them to its own ends."

"A world without war is not in the cards."

"I want to put any number of assorted 'ists' - such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists - firmly in their place."

"Finally, the unprecedented development of electronic information services seems to mark another step toward the coming collapse of the state. Traditionally no state has ever been able to completely control the thoughts of all its citizens; With the advent of computer networks and the consequent democratization of access to information, the battle between freedom and control was irretrievably lost by the latter, much to the regret of numerous governments.? ?Contrary to the fears of George Orwell in 1984, modern technology, in the form of nuclear weapons on the one hand and unprecedented means for communication and transportation on the other, has not resulted in the establishment of unshakable totalitarian dictatorships. The net effect has been to make governments lose power in favor of organizations that are not sovereign and are not states."

"If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot."

"In the future as in the past, both Clausewitz and Sun Tzu will undoubtedly have a lot to offer."

"Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or "the people," constitute the great majority of those affected."

"Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties ? the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Yet everywhere the idea of the nation is under attack ? either despised as an atavistic form of social unity, or even condemned as a cause of war and conflict, to be broken down and replaced by more enlightened and more universal forms of jurisdiction. But what, exactly, is supposed to replace the nation and the nation state?"

"Iran is the real victor in Iraq, and the world must now learn to live with a nuclear Iran the way we learned to live with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China?. We Israelis have what it takes to deter an Iranian attack. We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us?. thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany."

"It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to obtain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true: people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight."

"There cannot be a society without this experience of membership. For it is this that enables me to regard the interests and needs of strangers as my concern; that enables me to recognize the authority of decisions and laws.? ?Take away the experience of membership and the ground of the social contract disappears: social obligations become temporary, troubled, and defeasible, and the idea that one might be called upon to lay down one?s life for a collection of strangers begins to border on the absurd."

"Sun Tzu does not need my praise. His work has lived for over two thousand years, and will surely live for another two thousand without any help from me."

"While many states are either imploding or coming together, all of them face increasing competition from other forms of organization. Some of those organizations are private, others are public.In the future, and to a growing extent, more and more these organizations can be expected to emancipate themselves from state control and to play an independent role."