Jonathan

“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
― Bluto in Animal House

“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.”
― Martin Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat, from the Marne to Iraq

“He considered China’s interference in Korea to be an intolerable attempt to prevent the spread of enlightenment, and the war itself not merely a struggle between two countries but a “battle for the sake of world culture.”49”
― Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912

“policy. The lessons that the new Jews of Palestine learned from the Holocaust were that the Jewish people would always be under the threat of destruction, that others could not be relied upon to protect the Jews, and that the only way to do so was to have an independent state. A people living with this sense of perpetual danger of annihilation is going to take any and all measures, however extreme, to obtain security, and will relate to international laws and norms in a marginal manner, if at all.”
― Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations