Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled.

[W]e're taught that if one person kills another person, that is murder; but if a government kills a hundred thousand persons, that is patriotism.

In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.

I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities... Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions. And when I studied history after the War, I learned from reading on my own, not from my university classes, about the history of U.S. expansion and imperialism.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.