Propaganda that looks likes propaganda is third rate propaganda.
Campbell Stuart
attributed by Sidney Rogerson in
Propaganda in the Next War (1938)


Propaganda in America is far more successful than anyone ever thinks it is. Its achievement is what is not spoken, not talked about, not even thought. Even its invisibility is strength, it's impossible to counterattack unaction.
Bruce Winton Knight
How To Run A War (1936)


In general, you should seem to prove what people already want to believe, and to justify what they already want to do.
Terence H. Qualter
Opinion Control in Democracies (1985)
[paraphrased by Larry Beinhart in
American Hero (1993)]


Man is basically a battlefield ... a dark cellar in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex-crazed monkey are for ever engaged in mortal combat, the struggle being refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk.
D. Bannister
"Psychology as an exercise in paradox"
Bulletin of the British Psychology Society (v19, 1966)


Metaphors always pose dangerous traps for the policy analyst.
Fred Charles Ikle
Every War Must End (1991)


Evaluation of enemy strength is not an absolute, but a matter of piecing together scraps of reconnaisance and intelligence to form a picture, if possible a picture to fit preconceived theories or to suit the demands of a particular strategy. What a staff makes out of the available evidence depends upon the degree of optimism or pessimism prevailing among them, on what they want to believe or fear to believe, and sometimes upon the sensitivity of intuition of an individual.
Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August (1962)


Many wars in this century have been started with only the most nebulous expectations regarding the outcome, on the strength of plans that paid little, if any, attention to the ending. Many began inadvertantly without any plans at all.
Fred Charles Ikle
Every War Must End (1991)


War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August (1962)


It's always stupefying to encounter fundamentalists of any stripe, people who have built a protective shield around their minds. People who are impervious to practicality, who don't learn from experience, are always dangerous. And now we know them by their fruits.
Todd Gitlin
inteviewed in Salon by Laura McClure (7/19/2003)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/07/19/gitlin/print.html


Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity.
Barbara W. Tuchman
quoted by Lewis H. Lapham
in "The Road To Babylon"
Harper's (12/2002)
http://www.harpers.org/online/the_road_to_babylon/?pg=1


If you shudder at the thought of power, you don't belong in politics. You can't emote your way to power, you can't moralize your way, you have to strategize your way to power.
Todd Gitlin
inteviewed in Salon by Laura McClure (7/19/2003)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/07/19/gitlin/print.html


[T]he corollary of the theory and practice of terror [is] that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war. ... Through some peculiar failure ... the greater the terror, the more terror seemed to be necessary.
Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August (1962)