109 Quotes by Mark Bowden

The Muslim Brotherhood is not a party of preachers and missionaries but rather of divine enforcers,” he wrote. “Its mission is to blot out, by force if necessary, oppression, moral anarchy, social disorder, and exploitation so as to finish the so-called divine role of self-styled gods and replace evil with good. ‘Fight them,’ the Koran says, ’until there is no more oppression, and all submission is made to God alone.

And Johnson was a convert. Body counts were the first thing he asked for in regular war briefings. He bragged that his general in Vietnam killed thousands of enemy personnel for every one man he lost:.

But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.

Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by “memes,” a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move.

One of its analysts was Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time was back in the States compiling the report that – after he leaked it to the press in 1971 – would become known as The Pentagon Papers. The study showed that American leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years and had consistently enlarged it despite doubts that the effort could succeed.

The great hope of the Tet Offensive was that its very size and daring would trigger a surge of nationalism that would transcend barriers of ideology, class, and faith.

Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not.

Westin celebrated the New Year by shooting off some hand flares. Orders were “no fireworks,” but you couldn’t expect several hundred thousand men in a war zone, armed to the teeth with explosive devices, to follow an order like that.

Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures – intellectuals, athletes, musicians – stepped up to announce their opposition.