84 Quotes by Max Hastings

The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew.

The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman’s presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating ‘Reds’ in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed.

People who get on at school are the ones who play by the rules, and no one’s going to get far in later life playing by the system.

Above all, war was a reminder of the savagery of life.

In all armies, soldiers serving with forward combat units shared a contempt for the much larger number of men in the rear areas who fulfilled roles in which they faced negligible risk: the infantry bore 90 percent of global army casualties.

I’m a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I’m sort of an aggressive wet liberal.

It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane.

Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last.

On 1 November the old OSS man arrived by appointment at army headquarters, wearing uniform and carrying a .357 revolver together with $US40,000 in cash, which he deemed the appropriate fashion accessories for an afternoon’s work overthrowing a government.