When people know we are ready to use nuclear weapons, they're going to back off if we do something aggressive. So basically, nuclear weapons are always being used.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

I was told by journalists who can't publish it that there are in Mexico, close to the U.S. border, big areas that used to be devoted to agriculture that are now devoted to poppies. They say you can't get in there because they're guarded, first by the cartels, but also by the army, which goes hand in hand with the cartels.

One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.

The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

Who wrote the Bible? Current scholarship, to my knowledge, assumes that the material that constitutes the Old Testament was put together from various oral and folk traditions (many of them going far back) in the Hellenistic period. That was one of several currents, of which the collection that formed the New Testament was another.

The [Ronald] Reagan administration picked up the rhetoric of the anti-nuclear movement; they said "Yyeah, you're right." We have to eliminate nuclear weapons.