Avenger

From the anarchists of tsarist Russia to the IRA of 1916, from the Irgun and the Stern Gang to the EOKA in Cyprus, from the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the CCC in Belgium, the Action Directe in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction again in Germany, the Rengo Sekigun in Japan, through to the Shining Path in Peru to the modern IRA in Ulster or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of the comfortably raised, well-educated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity and a developed taste for self-indulgence.

The hatred of your country is not because it attacks theirs; it is because it keeps theirs safe. Never seek popularity. You can have supremacy or be loved but never both. What is felt toward you is ten percent genuine disagreement and ninety percent envy. Never forget two things! No man can ever forgive his protector. There is no loathing that any man harbors more intense than that toward his benefactor.

When it came to evil, to tolerate was to accommodate, to accommodate was to appease, and to appease was to concede defeat.

The United Nations had created a military “peacekeeping” force—the usual lunacy of sending a force to keep the peace where there was no peace to keep, then forbidding them to create the peace, ordering them instead to watch the slaughter without interfering.

One of the aspects of the genius of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that, although a convinced Democrat, he was quite prepared to use talent wherever he found it.

Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it

As he went down the steps to the street, something was troubling him. Something about the Vietcong officer, his face, the expression of frozen astonishment. At the end of the street passers-by turned to look at the young lawyer who threw back his head and laughed at the madness of Fate. Absently he rubbed his left hand where the one-time enemy's hot nut oil in the tunnel had scalded him.