This was not after all a conventional war, a struggle between equally predacious powers; it was a war to end all wars.

I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.

A man has deprived himself of the best there is in the world who has deprived himself of this.

It must be a peace without victory