Top 15 Thomas E. Ricks Quotes

As Orwell once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” — most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him — products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere.

For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly.

We should drop the bizarre American fiction that corporations are people, enjoying all the rights of citizens, including unfettered campaign donations as a form of free speech. Indeed, corporations possess greater rights than do people, as they cannot be jailed or executed, while citizens can and do suffer those fates. As the legal historian Zephyr Teachout has observed, the founders would have considered corporate campaign spending the essence of political corruption.

War. In 1901, he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, where he marched before Stonewall Jackson’s widow. He soon joined the Army, which then was recovering from its low ebb of the 1890s, the decade when the frontier officially closed and the last of the Indian wars ended. The Army expanded rapidly in the wake of the Spanish–American War of 1898, almost quadrupling in size to 100,000. As part of that growth, George Marshall received his commission. In this newly energized force, he stood out as a young officer. Marshall was temporarily posted to Fort Douglas, Utah — originally placed on a hillside overlooking Salt Lake City to keep an eye on Brigham Young’s nascent and hostile Mormon empire.

Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Other wartime leaders would do well to imitate his inquisitive approach. They should not look for consensus, and instead should examine differences between advisors, asking them for the reasons for their different views.

Orwell depicts the proletarians as essentially uncontrollable. The state does not try to control them as much as it simply distracts them.

One day in the 1950s, one of Churchill’s grandsons poked his head into the old man’s study. Is it true, the child inquired, that you are the greatest man in the world? Churchill, in typical fashion, responded, “Yes, and now bugger off.” The

Churchill, sensitive to class considerations in his conduct of the war, instructed his generals and admirals to be careful in how they governed the armed forces. Early on, he warned the navy to be “particularly careful that class prejudice does not enter into these decisions” about selection of cadets for officer training at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. “Unless some better reasons are given to me,” he vowed, he would investigate the matter. The navy resisted this direction, so he did as promised and intervened directly. He even met with some of the candidates who had scored well on entrance examinations but had still been rejected. “I have seen the three candidates,” he informed the navy’s top officers. “It is quite true that A has a slightly cockney accent, and that the other two are the sons of a chief petty officer and an engineer in the merchant service. But the whole intention of competitive examination is to open the service to ability, irrespective of class or fortune.” Concluding that an injustice had been done, he ordered that the three be admitted to officer training. This was a lot of effort for someone trying to run a war and stave off invasion.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

Orwell once commented that “whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.

When there is no coherent strategy, tactics, no matter how flashily executed, become meaningless.

is clear now that appeasement rested more on self-delusion than on rational calculation, because it necessarily required faith in Hitler’s sanity and trustworthiness.

foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story. It takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq. That is, Bush could only take such a careless action because of a series of failures in the American system. Major lapses occurred within the national security bureaucracy, from a weak National Security Council (NSC) to an overweening Pentagon and a confused intelligence apparatus. Larger failures of oversight also occurred in the political system, most notably in Congress, and in the inability of the media to find and present alternate sources of information about Iraq and the threat it did or didn’t present