“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
“Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements…they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
“Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1978
...there was a sober silence in the room. Samuel Adams, a key figure in the American Revolution and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, spoke up to say,
“We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven and from the rising to the setting of the sun, let His kingdom come.”
Colonel Douglas MacGregor predicts a continuation of the Iran war soon, once all sides have replenished missile stocks.
"Washington’s political class manifests much less regard for the long-term strategic interests of its own citizens—their security and prosperity. As a result, Washington pays an exorbitant price in reputation and treasure for policies that confront Palestinians with the choice of death or expulsion from their homelands.
"Assumptions of tacit acceptance or rapid capitulation are implicit and dangerous.
[The Muslims will not 'do a deal.']
"When Hitler was briefed on the expected Soviet reaction to Operation Barbarossa, Major General Ernst Koestring, a Prussian officer fluent in Russian from a family that had lived in Moscow since the reign of Catherine the Great, advised: “Initially, German forces will advance rapidly. The various peoples on the Soviet periphery will likely welcome the German forces. Resistance will be weak. But when the Germans advance into ...