Victor Davis Hanson > Quotes

“Entertainers wrongly assume that their fame, money, and influence arise from broad knowledge rather than natural talent, looks, or mastery of a narrow skill.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“Globalization has enriched the planet beyond belief, leading to ever-increased demands of perfection. And thanks to 24/7 communications, we all instantaneously know when these expectations aren't met.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“Behind every American soldier, dozens of their countrymen tonight sleep soundly — and hundreds more in their shadow abroad will wake up alive and safe.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes — affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism — the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)”
― Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

“But wars—or the threat of war—at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy—Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban—that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“Often the white elite signaled their disgust of the “white privilege” of the disintegrating middle class as a means of exempting their own quite genuine white privilege of insider contacts, professional degrees, wealth, inheritance, and influence.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Case for Trump

“Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then—as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us—they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)”
― Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

“human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

“Again, wars do not really end until the conditions that started them--a bellicose government, an aggressive leader, a national policy of brinksmanship--are eliminated. Otherwise, there remains a bellum interruptum, much like the so-called Peace of Nicias, when Athens and Sparta agreed to a time-out in 421 B.C., before going at each other with renewed and deadly fury in 415 B.C.”
― Victor Davis Hanson

“Barack Obama, for at least the first two years after his departure, had all but destroyed the traditional role of Democrats as a federal, state, and local majority party—and in its place had paved the way for a new neosocialist ascendency.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Case for Trump

“For a capitalist system to work, the state had to protect, not regulate or interfere with, free markets. Both for political and religious reasons, this the sultan could not do: The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance of trade. . . . Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman trade policy was that the state had to be concerned above all that the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer a shortage of necessities and raw material. Consequently, the imports were always welcomed and encouraged, and exports discouraged.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage & Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power

“General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism—only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“In some sense, winning against impossible odds—when most others cannot or would not try—is the only mark of a great general.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost - From Ancient Greece to Iraq

“Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT’S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“Physical deprivation and hunger are one thing; the poverty of the mind and psyche is quite another. Crashing Costco to find bulk beans and rice is not the same as flash-mobbing for Air Jordans and iPhones. How odd that our cultural elite and our dependent poor are somewhat alike, in a symbiotic relationship in which the latter guilt-trip the former for entitlements, with the assurance that the top of the pyramid is safe and free to fritter about far from those they worry about. No wonder those in between who lack the romance of the poor and the privileges and power of the elite are shrinking. We are entering the age of the bread-and-circuses Coliseum: luxury box seats for the fleshy senatorial class, free food and tickets for the rest—and the shrinking middle out in the sand of the arena providing the entertainment.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction

“tragedy, comedy, and the Parthenon were not so much expressions of native genius as reflections of lots of money.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

“Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost - From Ancient Greece to Iraq

“Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters argued, with some merit, that the collateral damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade resulted in far fewer innocents killed, in such a “terrible arithmetic,” than if the Serbian death squads had been allowed to continue their unchecked cleansing of Islamic communities.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“The United States is often criticized as interventionist, but in fact America’s traditional propensity has been more isolationist—willing to act forcefully in the world when absolutely necessary, but preferring to be unencumbered.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“it was the horror of the two world wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—that led to our own era’s questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationalistic Westerners went to war in an industrial age of weaponry of mass annihilation, but rather because the liberal democracies were unwilling to make moderate sacrifices to keep the peace well before 1914 and 1939—when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism, and then Nazism without millions of the blameless perishing.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past—like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“In a 2017 poll taken by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, most Americans appeared ignorant of the fundamentals of the US Constitution. Thirty-seven percent could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Only one out of four Americans could name all three branches of government. One in three could not name any branch of government. In a 2018 survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, almost 75 percent of those polled were not able to identify the thirteen original colonies. Over half had no idea whom the United States fought in World War II. Less than 25 percent knew why colonists had fought the Revolutionary War. Twelve percent thought Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded troops in the Civil War.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to deter them, was understandably seen as antithetical to a more enlightened understanding of human nature.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“Democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

“For years postmodernists have lectured us that there is no truth, no absolutes, no timeless protocols worthy of reverence; Trump is their Nemesis, who reifies their theories that truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.”
― Victor Davis Hanson