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The Real War QUOTES

The Real War QUOTES

1 " The defining characteristic of today's intellectual and media elite is that it swims merrily in a sea of fantasy. The world of television is essentially a fantasy world, and television is today's [1980's] common denominator of communication, today's unifying American experience. This has frightening implications for the future. Ideas that fit on bumper stickers are not ideas at all, they simply are attitudes. And attitudinizing is no substitute for analysis. Unfortunately, too often television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy, and this has a corrosive effect on public understanding of those issues on which national survival may depend. "

― Richard M. Nixon , The Real War

2 " If America loses World War III [the Cold War], it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the 'trendies'--those over-glamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, mount the fashionable protests, and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given them and their 'causes' romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip. These trendies are ready with an opinion at the drop of a microphone, and their opinions are treated as news--not because they are authorities, but because they are celebrities. "

― Richard M. Nixon , The Real War

3 " The time when a nation most craves ease may be the moment when it can least afford to let down its guard. The moment when it most wishes it could address its domestic needs may be the moment when it most urgently has to confront an external threat. The nation that survives is the one that rises to meet that moment: that has the wisdom to recognize the threat and the will to turn it back, and that does so before it is too late. The naive notion that we can preserve freedom by exuding goodwill is not only silly, but dangerous. The more adherents it wins, the more it tempts the aggressor. "

― Richard M. Nixon , The Real War