Quotes About Daniel Ellsberg

I can remember only a small handful of instances in which I talked about politics with my parents. I remember my parents telling me that Daniel Ellsberg was a hero when I was six years old.

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.

My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.

One of its analysts was Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time was back in the States compiling the report that—after he leaked it to the press in 1971—would become known as The Pentagon Papers. The study showed that American leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years and had consistently enlarged it despite doubts that the effort could succeed.

Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.

A scholar as authoritative as Richard Rhodes97 was still writing in 1995 that the Soviets had over forty ICBMs in 1961, ten times more than they actually had.

Vietnam to defend democracy, and remembers me responding that the Saigon regime was no democracy.

Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. —Friedrich Nietzsche

What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

His shelter, as it turned out, burned down in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis the next year, leading Leo Szilard to comment that this proved not only that there was a God but that He had a sense of humor.