Quote of the Day

"A democracy is peaceloving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The face of the provocation then becomes itself the issue. Democracy fights in anger - it fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish that power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it ... Such a war must be carried to the bitter end ... I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath - in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat."

-George F. Kennan,
former ambassador to the Soviet Union, in American Diplomacy, 1951.