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The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.

The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.

It's the first war we've ever fought on the television screen and the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.