First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.

War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.

America's victory in the Cold War was not without painful social costs.

Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?

All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.