Quotes from Victor Davis Hanson

For years postmodernists have lectured us that there is no truth, no absolutes, no timeless protocols worthy of reverence; Trump is their Nemesis, who reifies their theories that truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.

Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back.

In some sense, winning against impossible odds—when most others cannot or would not try—is the only mark of a great general.

When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support.

It is as if, when unhappy with the opulent present, we look to the impoverished past to blame our unhappiness on the dead, who faced daunting natural obstacles, rather than the living, who so often don't.

officials were losing their jobs over their involvement in real collusion that as of yet lacked a special investigator or counsel.

After September 1939, perhaps one billion of the world's roughly two billion population were soldiers, partisans, and producers engaged in trying to kill people.

After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets' efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come.

Wealthy tech workers in San Francisco hold frequent conferences and symposia about addressing water, sewage, and disease in Africa, but they have demonstrated no ability to address California's own fetid city streets, which are home to over three hundred thousand homeless and rife with medieval diseases, refuse, excrement, and rodents.

Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.

America, then, is only as good as the citizens of any era who choose to preserve and to nourish it for one more generation. Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.3

one can imagine what a candidate Trump would have done with the Wright-Obama connection had he been the 2008 Republican nominee.

agenda. These themes frame the formal plan of this book. The argument covers the three years since Trump announced his presidential bid in July 2015 to mid-2018, as he neared the end of the second year of his presidency. Part 1, the first three chapters

One of the ancient and modern critiques of democracy is that radicals destroy norms for short-term political gain, norms that they themselves often later seek as refuge.

The great American contribution to the Red Army was not just food stocks and strategic materials but nearly four hundred thousand heavy transport trucks, which eventually allowed Stalin a mobility and rapidity lacking among his Nazi enemies on the eastern front.

Citizenship, after all, is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities—and they don't worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges.1

close cooperation with Saudi Arabia against the Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Apparently, Trump figured that to demand cessations of these operations that others had started would call upon him the wrath of hawkish Republicans and fuel charges of isolationism

The larger themes of the new signature progressivism were identity politics, radical environmentalism, and redistributionism.

Hillary apparently never appreciated that when she went after Trump's sins of the flesh, it would quickly prove a losing proposition.

Saving the world is a much more ambitious, ennobling, and ego-gratifying project than preserving the neighborhood.

The clever globe-trotting fox learns many things about the world, the local burrowing hedgehog only one: the essential truth that people are people, and learning how to understand and serve them begins at home with those one sees and speaks with face to face.

It may be now blasphemous to concede that much of the current division in the country was deliberately whipped up by Obama. Often in mellifluous tones and with near academic authority, he accentuated racial and cultural differences.

Out of spite, McCain had flipped on his earlier support of Obamacare just to cast the deciding vote that defeated Trump's effort to repeal and replace it.

When ideologues cannot persuade Americans to support their agenda under the existing political rules and traditions of the nation, they seek to alter them for their own advantage—often by redefining citizenship as something never envisioned by the Founders.