"Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government)." Concerning drugs: "If they didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens 'sinless and obedient.' - Gore Vidal

"If only more of today's military personnel would realize that they are being used by the owning elites as a publicly-subsidized capitalist goon squad. - Smedley Butler

"The United States now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might be called "imperial overstretch" - that is to say, decision makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum of the total United States global interests and obligations is nowadays far greater than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously. --Paul Kennedy, 'The Rise and Fall of Great Powers'

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. --Plato, 347 B.C.

"Governments need armies to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects." --Tolstoy

"Man, biologically considered...is the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and indeed the only one that preys systematically on his own species. --William James

"In over two hundred years, the North American continent has not been attacked - nor even seriously-threatened with invasion by Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, or anyone else. But over a million Americans have been killed in wars and trillions of dollars have been spent by the military - nearly $13 trillion on the Cold War alone." --Thomas H. Naylor & William H. Willimon 'Downsizing the USA'

"A great war always creates more scoundrels than it kills." --Unknown

"Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat- including men - from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources." --Charles Tilly

"Whoever has an army has power, and war decides everything." --Mao Tse-Tung