I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.
It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.
I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered - and still suffers - from mental illness. For a long time I imagined - and I know it's absurd - that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.
For the sake of the troops, for the love of the troops, we must not add yet another casualty to this war. We must not let truth be a casualty of this war.
They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.
It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.
There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
Catch-22's first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.
I was eighteen when I first read Joseph Heller's stunning work 'Catch-22,' and was at that time close to being drafted for the fruitless and unenlightened war in Viet Nam.
There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.
After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.
Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism.
There are many different ways of categorizing news. It doesn't have to be just war and famine and serious politics.
Rich people never go to war. You ask a college kid to go to war, and he's like, 'Umm, I'm taking this sociology class, and I think war is, like, really stupid, and my roommate's, like, half Afghani, so it's going to cause some static.'
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.
The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.
The present danger which this country faces is at least as great as the danger which we faced during the war with Germany and Japan. Briefly stated, it is the very real danger that this country, as we know it, may cease to exist.
As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.
I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.
