The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.
Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.
The war in Afghanistan is too important to be reduced to a political football. We are fighting there to protect our national security. We are confronting the Taliban-led insurgency to prevent terrorists returning to that country.
Russia's first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean.
Concerned about re-election, interest-group reactions, the media, or fundraising, many legislators have found it in their interest to refuse to cooperate with members of the opposing party - or to treat them as enemies in some kind of war, in which the whole point is to defeat and humiliate them. But the American people have been the real losers.
There are grave misgivings that the discussion on ecology may be designed to distract attention from the problems of war and poverty.
At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since.
Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War - both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There's a pulse to it.
Cape Cod baseball dates back to the time of the Civil War. A poster at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown touts a round-trip train ride from Hyannis to Sandwich on July 4, 1885 - the occasion of the 14th annual baseball game between Sandwich and Barnstable.
Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced.
The Iraq war fueled distrust of the press from both sides.
From 1836, down to last year, there is no proof of the Government having any confidence in the duration of peace, or possessing increased security against war.
It is not a dream that someday, nations will be able to settle their difficulties without war, just as individuals now settle their personal feuds without resorting to arguments of physical strength or sharp steel. For, then, humanity will have created international jurisdiction and a power to enforce its laws.
Bush's war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties.
It is an old custom amongst Jewish children, to become war-like on the 'L'ag Beomer.' They arm themselves from head to foot with wooden swords, pop-guns and bows and arrows. They take food with them, and go off to wage war.
For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world.
I remember the '80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.
Throughout the years following World War II and until the formation of the European Economic Community in 1958, I was very active as a national or international rapporteur at many of the international conferences aiming to establish an European community.
Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.
We can best honor the memories of those who were killed on September 11 and those who have been killed fighting the war on terrorism, by dedicating ourselves to building a free and peaceful world safe from the threat of terrorism.
Every time a pundit or elected official is on any TV news program, it should be a polite formality to mention that GE has made such and such billions off the war in Iraq by selling arms or that Murdoch is a right-wing activist with a clear stake in who wins and who taxes his profits the least.
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.
In 'Sisters of War,' I got to do one of my own stunts. Running out of the building because the Japanese were firing, with all these little spark plugs are going off, looking like explosions and bullets flying down. That was really fun.
Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.
Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn't work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won't work for you either.
The cultural war of words has actually been won by the most dispossessed people in the Western world, the urban American blacks.
You may not like Mr. Roosevelt, but if he loss the war, we all lose it with him.
If the president is going to use so much language of theology and the Bible, then let's use that language for a serious discussion about the war in Iraq. And that was never done.
These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War.
We're a nation of celebrity and hero worshipers, so much so that we make heroes out of those who aren't, such as John Wayne: a patriotic, red-blooded, two-fisted American who spent the Second World War in the trenches on the movie lots of Hollywood.
The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
The environmental movement doesn't have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually, there will be open war.
I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter.
The post-Cold War order in Europe is finished, with Vladimir Putin its executioner. Russia's invasion of Georgia only marked its passing. Russia has emerged as a born-again 19th-century power determined to challenge the intellectual, moral and institutional foundations of the order.
Moviewise, I would love to make the story of princess Erendira. She was a 16 year old princess/warrior who led her tribe in war against the Spanish around 1513. She almost defeated them, and the Tarascans were the only tribe the Aztecs couldn't defeat.
With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.
