Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Max Boot - Page 2

I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven't focused so much on those parts of my identity. I've always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, as many as 60,000 people were executed in Europe as suspected witches. But it would be nice to think that centuries of advances in science and education have made people less prey to phantasms and falsehoods.

Silence is complicity. All Republicans who stand mute in the face of Trump's latest racism are telling you who they really are.

Even being too good at teaching is risky at research universities; the joke is that a 'teacher of the year' award is the kiss of death for non-tenured professors.

Soliciting anything of value from a foreign national to help a U.S. campaign is not just illegal; it is the Founding Fathers' nightmare.

On both sides of the Atlantic, politics has come to be dominated by vitriolic name-calling and pervasive dishonesty.

When Democrats aren't being fiscally reckless, they are economically irresponsible. Democrats bemoan corporate greed and have not a positive word to say about the entrepreneurs that have made our economy the envy of the world.

Olga E. Kagan was the strongest woman I knew - and probably the reason I've spent my life with other strong women.

Mom developed an interest in 'heritage-language education after noticing an increasing number of students in her UCLA classes whose parents were Russian.

At the University of California at Berkeley, my interests broadened from military history to diplomatic history and other disciplines.

I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.

You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.

The scandal isn't that refugees want to come to the United States. It's that Trump is abusing these aspiring Americans and closing our doors to them.

I yearn for intellectual sustenance on vacation but want, of course, to avoid tedium or boredom. I want to read something that will entertain me but also help me appreciate what I am seeing.

What would I do now, at age 48, if I were deported to a country that I have not seen in more than 40 years and whose language I no longer speak? How would I work? How would I survive?

I am certain that my family - my grandmother, mother and myself - had a credit score of zero when we arrived in 1976. There were no credit cards in the Soviet Union, and we didn't have any money.

Anyone anywhere - as long as you live in a country that does not censor the Internet - can now read this newspaper. But like diners passing up a healthy salad for an artery-clogging cheeseburger, many information consumers are instead digesting junk news.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

Joe Biden stands out from other Democratic candidates not just by taking on President Trump directly but also by seeking to separate Trump from the rest of the Republican Party.

There has been an unspoken assumption among establishment Republicans that all they have to do is wait out Hurricane Trump and then return to 'normal' conservatism.

We have a long, ugly history of white supremacy in this country, ranging from Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans down to the 1924 Immigration Act to keep non-Europeans out.

I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it.

My mother and I were alike in one crucial respect: We may have been Russian by birth, but we were English in spirit. She was intensely reserved and private, and seldom showed what she was feeling.

The Immigration Act of 1924 closed our doors to virtually all non-European immigrants - a great wrong that was not rectified for decades.

Yet another reason to be angry at President Trump: He is forcing me - and every other American who is not a racist - to defend the most left-wing members of Congress.

I used to be one of those people who read thrillers on vacation, but for some reason most thrillers no longer thrill me. Maybe because these days reality is far more unbelievable than any fiction?

The case for democracy is that voters in the aggregate will make better decisions than a lone monarch or dictator would.

Democrats deserve credit for engaging with big issues such as climate change and income inequality and coming up with bold, imaginative solutions.

There are two kinds of people: Those who like active vacations and those who like sedentary vacations. I'm one of the weird hybrids who likes both. That makes me, I suppose, the Jekyll and Hyde of holidayers.

Irrationality may be more prevalent in the party of climate denial, but it isn't limited to Republicans.

Growing up in the 1980s, I remember when the GOP was the party of ideas. Now it's brain dead.

At Mom's funeral, mourner after mourner spoke about what a wonderful teacher she was. She was certainly devoted to her students.

Logic, fact, morality, legality, ideology: All of it is irrelevant in understanding the Party of Trump. Republicans have made crystal clear that nothing matters to them other than partisanship.

Unfortunately, history suggests that dictatorial regimes can withstand years, even decades, of economic sanctions.

Neoconservatism' once had a real meaning - back in the 1970s. But the label has now become meaningless. With many of those who are described as neocons, including me, fleeing the Trumpified right, the term's sell-by date has passed.

To win in 2020, a Democratic nominee will need to win back voters in key Midwestern states who supported Trump in 2016.

People who sit for hours in a beach chair or an airplane seat without any reading material simply baffle me: What is going on between their ears, I wonder?

Trump doesn't need his own agenda if he can terrify independent voters in swing states about what would happen if the Democratic agenda is implemented.

All acts of terrorism - all killings of the innocent - are an abomination, and one that is made all the worse when the victims are chosen for their skin color, ethnicity, sexuality or religious beliefs.

In some ways the most appalling thing of all, that Trump continues to question the fact of a very serious Russian attack on the core of our political system. I mean, I don't know how you get more reckless and dangerous than that. And you know, the president's first obligation is to defend the country. And in this respect, he doesn't seem to be interested in doing that.

I think, of the kind of erratic behavior that many of us feared once Trump came into office. And I think you're seeing evidence of that, even though, you know, some of the worst-case scenarios that we imagined have not yet, mercifully, come to pass. I mean, for example, he has not destroyed NATO. He has not launched a trade war with China. He has not lifted sanctions on Russia. In all those cases, in part, because his hands had been tied. And of course, it's only a year in, so he's still got time to go.

Without U.S. troops, Afghanistan, like Iraq, could descend into chaos.

I can actually approve of some of Donald Trump's North Korea policy, the sanctions, for example, doing things that other presidents would have done. But it's impossible to imagine any other president going before the U.N. General Assembly and referring to the dictator of North Korea as "Rocket Man," or issuing this series of blustery threats, which, frankly, are terrifying, and are raising the risk of a needless war.

If we fail to achieve our goals in Iraq - which the administration defines as a 'unified, stable, democratic and secure nation' - it won't be the fault of the ink-stained wretches or even their blow-dried TV counterparts. To argue otherwise deflects blame from those who deserve it, in the upper echelons of the administration and the armed forces. Perhaps that's the point.