A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding.

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance.

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

We've gone through rounds of tax cutting and rounds of tax increases in modern U.S. history. We haven't really had a big igniting of a trade war belligerence since the Depression era, and that's not an era that we want to repeat.