Quote

We were in opposition to the decision to go to war. But after the war happened, it was clear that you could not sit and look-there would be a breeding ground for terrorism or a new collapsed or failed state named Iraq!

The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

And there was a movement afoot to take another year off, and if we had been able to do that, and rethink everything, I think when we came back it would have been very different.

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

To my mind, what we ought to have maintained from the beginning was the strictest neutrality. If we had done this, I do not believe we would have been on the verge of war at the present time.

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.

The war changed everybody's attitude. We became international almost overnight.

We were thus led to organize ourselves, as men who had fought the war together, in order to support those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons of that World War, thus attempting to prevent its recurrence.

We came to know each other in war, and in war we continue.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.