Walter Millis quotes

War challenges virtually every other institution of society - the justice and equity of its economy, the adequacy of its political systems, the energy of its productive plant, the bases, wisdom and purposes of its foreign policy.
-- Walter Millis

#War #Justice #Political

The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.
-- Walter Millis

#Strong #War #Character

On the whole, it seems to me that probably the American press is doing a better job of this mediation, so to speak, between the people and the administration than the press of any other country.
-- Walter Millis

#Country #Jobs #People

Any two public institutions appealing to the same set of people are apt to appeal in the same terms.
-- Walter Millis

#Two #People #Institutions

President tends to feel that he cannot go beyond what the public will support him in doing. So he tries not to decide what is the best course so much as to decide what the people will support.
-- Walter Millis

#People #Support #Trying

I think it's very difficult to make any single, generalized statements about the press, of course the press is such varied character and quality and to the different media and so on, so a generalization is very difficult.
-- Walter Millis

#Character #Thinking #Media

The people have only a very vague direct power. They have the power of voting against the administration, again after its decisions have been taken; but they have no way of getting into the question of policy-making, decision-making, except insofar as the vague forces and pressures of public debate and public opinion have their impact on the President. The President still has to decide. He can't go to the people and ask them to decide for him; he has to make the decision. In that sense he was condemned to be a dictator.
-- Walter Millis

#Taken #Impact #Policy Making

If you go out to some of the big cities in California, and you look at some of the monopoly situations out there, the thing is just shocking. And the tendency, and I think it's bound to be, unless it is carefully combated by those who are managing the papers, the tendency of a monopoly situation is bound to be to damp everything down to a common level.
-- Walter Millis

#Thinking #Cities #California

To be nonviolent to human beings and to be a killer or enemy of the poor animals is Satan's philosophy. In this age there is always enmity against poor animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.

No war is inevitable until it breaks out.

Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.

Education for all seems to be the product of a type of distributive justice that is in no way related to the individual.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.

A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

The current political tension is very serious. We have not yet ruled out a boycott of the election.