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Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex.

The war begins to make itself felt very near to us.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

A man who's never seen war is like a woman who's never given birth - soft in the head.

My father never felt the need to wrap himself in anybody's mantle. He never felt the need to pretend to be anybody else. This is their administration. This is their war. If they can't stand on their own two feet, well, they're no Ronald Reagans, that's for sure.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

There's no doubt that usually a president's public image is enhanced by going to war. That never did appeal to me.

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.

As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.