A civilised man is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat.

The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence.

Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they?

I think to be shot in a mountain valley somewhere or other is altogether less glorious than crashing an airliner into a skyscraper.

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.

I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it.

Of whatever class or nation, however, all successful participants in the repetitive and unrelenting stress of aerial fighting came eventually to display its characteristic physiognomy: skeletal hands, sharpened noses, tight-drawn cheek bones, the bared teeth of a rictus smile and the fixed, narrowed gaze of men in a state of controlled fear.