Pulitzer Prize Winners

"A serious and searching book... Illuminating interpretations... Often we have been reminded by it of the writings of C. E. Montague after the last war. We cannot give it higher praise."

"A book which had a particular influence on me was the American Herbert Agar's A Time for Greatness, which appeared in 1944. This was a strangely powerful analysis of how the West's moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which had followed. It urged a return to Western liberal democratic values and – though I liked this less – a fair amount of left-wing social engineering. For me the important message of Agar's book was that the fight against Hitler had a significance for civilization and human destiny which exceeded the clash of national interests or spheres of influence or access to resources or any of the other – doubtless important – stuff of power politics."

"I hope that many people will read it and find it stimulating."

"Our religious heritage, as we have said, requires of us a belief in the dignity and worth of the common man. Our political institutions have been formed to protect this belief and to give it chance for expression. If we neglect those institutions or misunderstand them, if we neglect our religious heritage or forget what it demands of us, we expose ourselves to the danger that there may appear in our midst men willing to seize absolute power and to bring back that ancient curse, the sovereign state. There can be no Christianity in such a state, no honor for the common man. Our fathers knew this in theory, which is why they labored to build a constitutional government and not an irresponsible "state." We have learned the lesson pragmatically, watching with astonished eyes while all the theories of our fathers are proved by the most ruthless of teachers. This is why we must labor not only to destroy the Axis but to remove the sovereign state, the Moloch state, from the face of the earth."

"Written with great penetration and of special interest to our time."

"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. If a paper consults only the wishes of its readers, it may never print a lie but it may also never print a word that justifies its freedom. The divorce news, the crime news, the sports news, the women’s-page news, the news of great disasters or great battles — this is sure to be popular. But if this were all that a newspaper printed, there would be no need to give it special protection under the Constitution. The protection is needed for the printing of news that someone would prefer not to hear, or that someone else would prefer not to have told."

"We are not the arsenal of democracy. We are still in the position of regarding the war as a combination of a major charity and a small boom. Another danger story, which Wheeler and Lindbergh are fostering is that this is just another of the old wars, and that it is only necessary to get rid of a few Germans and everything will be all right. That is a story which should be kept out of the public mind because it is a lie, and because it tends to keep America out of the war. We have to realize, and make all the American people understand, that this is a definitive revolution on a world scale against civilization as it exists. It aims to kill everything that stands for freedom; and there is no hope unless we think in terms like these."

"This country took me and my family in when we were at one of the lowest points of our lives and returned to me a feeling I had lost: that of being safe. I was so proud when I eventually took the oath of citizenship and posed for photos, waving an American flag, in front of the courthouse where I was sworn in."

"Sweden avoided World War II, sparing itself the German occupation that Norway endured and the Soviet invasion suffered by the Finns. During the Cold War, Sweden continued its neutral path...[and] declined to join NATO. And then Feb. 24, 2022, happened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought into sharp relief the limitations of being in Europe but not having the security guarantees of NATO’s collective defense pact. The Finns — dragging the Swedes with them — applied for membership in the alliance."

"I have always been a daughter of two countries, in large part because without America, my adopted country, my native country of Liberia would not exist."

"Astronomers mapped the motions of hundreds of stars in the in order to deduce the amount of that must be tugging on them from the vicinity of our sun. Their surprising conclusion? There's no dark matter around here. As the researchers write in a forthcoming paper in the ', the stellar motion implies that the stars, all within 13,000 light-years of Earth, are gravitationally attracted by the visible material in our solar system — the sun, planets and surrounding gas and dust — and not by any unseen matter. "Our calculations show that [dark matter] should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!" said lead study author Christian Moni-Bidin, an astronomer at the in Chile."

"I decided to become a physicist when I read ' ... age thirteen. I think it was the tenth anniversary edition of the book ... So I went to Tufts University (for undergrad) ... majored in physics. ... from there I went to grad school at Berkeley — which is where I had always wanted to go. ... And I really liked it there. But then something kind of remarkable happened that I don't really understand very well. ... in the course of one sleepless night during my first year at Berkeley, I had a complete crisis — and realized that I didn't want to be a physicist. I wanted to be a physics writer."

"Above all, I am looking for a new idea or finding that scientists in the relevant community think is important. Even if it’s something really abstruse that doesn’t seem like it would have broad appeal and doesn’t have any buzzwords to speak of, if actual experts think something is a big deal, then there’s a reason for that, and it’s up to me to figure out what the story is and how to tell it. Everything else that makes a compelling story — interesting historical background, strong characters, controversy, vivid scenes — is incidental. I’m thrilled when it’s there (and it almost always is), but I’m first and foremost going after groundbreaking new developments, as judged by experts. Now to find out about those developments before everybody else does, I have to be tapped in and talk to a lot of scientists. Building and maintaining those relationships takes time and is tough to balance with all of one’s other duties as a reporter, but it’s the springboard for everything else."

"Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest."

"WHY WRITE? Reasons to do : • Societal progress • Scientific progress • Enrich people's intellectual lives • Enrich your own intellectual life"

"There are other issues... Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't we doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why don't we find out how good or bad this policy is?..."

"Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough...."

"There is no middle ground anymore. There’s no standard. If you like Trump, you watch Fox. If you don’t like Trump, you watch CNN] or MSNBC, or read [[w:The New York Times|The [New York] Times]]."

"I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it's not, but at least we offer some way out, some integrity."

"Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for?"

"The New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."

"I've been a freelancer since 1979. There’s something good about it, because I can pick what I want to do, within limits, assuming I can turn in enough good stories and my ideas are good enough. I’m not at the mercy of an editor. When I did it, you could do long-form reporting as a freelancer. Once I began to get connected with The New Yorker, everybody assumed I was working for it, but I was always on contract. I wanted to be. I could have changed it, but then I would have had the editors have control over me, so I didn’t want that. On the other hand, they still had control over me, because I would do an assignment. They were the editor and they paid the bills. I don’t know if I was being silly or not, but whatever happened, it turned out that it was all fine. Serendipity, I guess."

"It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]... It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president..."

"The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing"

"Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we've all written the notion there's constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate... Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that"

"[[Edward Snowden|He [Edward Snowden] ]] changed the whole ball game... But I don't know if it's going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters 'al-Qaida, al-Qaida' and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic..."

"In return, one of those detractors depicted the State Department... Their attitude is that we're yahoos—especially those of us who come from the far right. The American Enterprise Institute"—a conservative think tank in Washington—"is like Darth Vader's mother ship for them.""

"I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all over... The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won't like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that's what we're supposed to be doing..."

"I just flunked out of law school. I worked all the time through college, and I got into law school because the father of one of my good friends was a professor there... But anyway, the bottom line is I bummed around and I finally heard about a job as a police reporter. The requirements were a BA and you were alive and willing to work for $40 a week or something like that. It was 1960... So that’s how I started. Sheer serendipity. And I learned my own way. I assume that I was a better reporter for having worked as I did for w:United Press InternationalUnited Press International and then for the AP. And come up being a police reporter in Chicago. I thought I was more equipped to deal with the dirty world that existed than some guy that was editor of Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News... On the other hand, I met a lot of people who were editors of the Harvard Crimson or worked for David Halberstam [editor of the Crimson] who were great reporters... I’d like to think that being on the street like I was for years helped."

"I want the American people to stop believing everything they hear and to ask more questions, to become more skeptical. I think it's the one reason a guy like Donald Trump ran. They understood where he was coming from. That Trump is just a blowhard. They laughed at him. They knew Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. But Trump wasn't the same old big smile and a lot of good words. The Democrats have been going around saying, "We're for the people, we're for the little guy." And all they do is run to Wall Street for money. And the one guy that didn't, [[Bernie Sanders|[Bernie] Sanders]], was sabotaged by the Democratic National Committee. ... What did these hacked messages from the DNC say, anyway? It was about cutting off money for Sanders. Everything that was leaked showed that the Democratic Party was working against the one guy who wasn't running on campaign funds from the big corporations."

"There is also no certainty about how Israel will respond if Saddam launches weapons of mass destruction toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem—as many officials believe he will do, or try to do, once an American invasion takes place."

"None of this has ever been discussed in the open in Israel, or in the Knesset. Meanwhile, Israeli field commanders have accepted nuclear artillery shells and land mines as battlefield necessities: another means to an end. The basic target of Israel's nuclear arsenal has been and will continue to be its Arab neighbors. Should war break out in the Middle East again and should the Syrians and the Egyptians break through again as they did in 1973, or should any Arab nation fire missiles again at Israel, as Iraq did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability. Never again. Epilogue p. 319"

"The normal planning procedures have been marginalized, according to many military and intelligence officials. These usually include a series of careful preliminary studies under the control of the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But now there is far less involvement by the Joint Chiefs and their chairman...."

"America's policy toward the Israeli arsenal, as we have seen in this book, was not just one of benign neglect: it was a conscious policy of ignoring reality."

"The mission planners, anxious to avoid international protest, had gone to extremes to mask the operation: it was hoped that Iraq and the rest of the world would be unable to fix blame for the bombing on the unmarked \ Israeli Air Force planes. The attack had been carried out, as planned, in two minutes, and the likelihood of any detection was slight. But Menachem Begin, buoyed by the success, stunned his colleagues on June 8 by unilaterally announcing the Israeli coup.... On the next day, as Israel was besieged with protests, the prime minister defended the operation and vowed that Israel was ready to strike again, if necessary, to prevent an enemy from developing the atomic bomb. p. 9"

"Israeli physicists are still at the cutting edge in weapons technology and involved, as are their American and Soviet counterparts, in intensive research into nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, hydrodynamics, and radiation transport — the next generation of weaponry. Epilogue p. 319"

"The Pentagon's conservative and highly assertive civilian leadership, assembled by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has extraordinary influence in George W. Bush's Washington. These civilians have been the most vigorous advocates for early action against Saddam Hussein..."

""It's the return of the right-wing crazies, crawling their way back," one of Armitage's associates said, referring to Wolfowitz's team"

"The Israeli bombing triggered worldwide protest, and a few days later the White House announced the suspension of a scheduled delivery of four more F-i6s, a continuation of the 1975 sale. Two months later, with little fanfare, the administration's real policy emerged: the suspension was lifted and the aircraft were delivered without incident."

"What's going on [with journalists]?... Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It's journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize..."

"There was controversy inside Israel, too, over the bombing, which had been debated at the highest levels of the Israeli government since late 1979. Yitzhak Hofi, the director of Mossad, and Major General Yehoshua Saguy, chief of military intelligence, both opposed the attack, primarily because there was no evidence that Iraq was as yet capable of building a bomb."

"In September 1988, Israel launched its first satellite into orbit, bringing it a huge step closer to intercontinental missiles and a satellite intelligence capability — no more Jonathan Pollards would be needed to steal America's secrets. Scientists at Z Division concluded that the rocket booster that launched the Israeli satellite produced enough thrust to deliver a small nuclear warhead to a target more than six thousand miles away. Epilogue p. 319"

"Pentagon officials, in turn, accuse Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, of a loss of nerve."

"The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple."

"Young kids still see journalism as a viable way of dealing with the problems of society––particularly with a president who’s tone deaf on so much stuff."

"I’ve been a freelancer for much of my career. In 1969, I broke the story of a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who... were ordered to attack an ordinary peasant village.. and told to kill on sight. The boys murdered, raped and mutilated for hours, with no enemy to be found."

"America's most important military secret in 1979 was in orbit, whirling effortlessly around the world every ninety- six minutes, taking uncanny and invaluable reconnaissance photographs of all that lay hundreds of miles below. The satellite, known as KH-11, was an astonishing leap in technology: its images were capable of being digitally relayed to ground stations where they were picked up — in "real time" — for instant analysis by the intelligence community. There would be no more Pearl Harbors."

"“The C.I.A. was never satisfied with the F.B.I. and, can't blame them,” the former official said. “We did hit or miss jobs... “We just went through the motions on our investigation. It was just a brushoff.”"

"The Carter administration followed Ford's precedent by tightly restricting access to the high-quality imagery: even Great Britain, America's closest ally in the intelligence world, was limited to seeing photographs on a"

"The official also raised question about the bureaucratic procedures of the C.I.A. under Mr. Helms and suggested that his penchant for secrecy apparently kept the most complete intelligence information from being forwarded to the White House."