In 1945, there were more people killed, more buildings destroyed, more high explosives set off, more fires burning than before or since.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries you have these great nation states hurling their young men at one another. The victory was really going to rest on who could do the best job of bringing up their kids to become efficient and effective soldiers. That's pretty grandiose, I guess, but I do think that, and thank God it's been the armies of democracy that have emerged from this as the triumphant armies.

Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

The Holocaust was the most evil crime ever committed.

Eisenhower is my choice as the American of the 20th Century. Of all the men I've studied and written about, he is the brightest and the best.

Nixon regarded himself as having been cheated by life. He never got my vote.

Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn't come here to fear. They hadn't come to die. They had come to win.