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“For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.”

“You pick up very well-known books on Lincoln [and] you will find almost no reference to his long-term belief in colonization. Why? Because it doesn't fit the image of the Great Emancipator. It doesn't fit the retrospective view we want to have of Lincoln as the man who was the moralist in politics, who came into office committed to ending slavery and waited to sign this document.”

“The Senate, compared to the House, is where things are supposed to slow down, by design, Founding Father design. The Founding Fathers were hell-bent to stop government action. The Constitution limited government. And that's why people like Obama and Democrats call it a charter of negative liberties because it limits government. It's an anti-government, pro-citizen document. And the founders wanted to make it hard.”

“That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.”

“In India, [in] the great documents like [the] Upanishads in eighth century B.C., you find some of the wisest [women] making great, learned speeches and then you worship them, but actually don't do very much about girls' education generally. So I think there has been a kind of dual presence of pain, respect, and saying you are great, etc., but not providing the basic facilities that make women able to lead the kind of life that they would like to and that men easily do.”

“If you look at US internal documents, they explain very clearly what the threat of Cuba was. So, back in the early 1960s the State Department described the threat of Cuba as Castro's successful defiance of US policy, going back to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine established the US claim to dominate the Western hemisphere and Castro was successfully defying that. That's not tolerable. It is like somebody saying "let's have democracy in Greece," and we just can't tolerate that so we have to destroy the threat at its roots.”

“Why was the United States so afraid of an independent South Vietnam? Well, I think the reason again is pretty clear from the internal government documents. Precisely what they were afraid of was that the "takeover" of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal. They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development - and that the whole region might work.”

“I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.”

“There are by now declassified documents from the 1950s that tells you a lot about what's going on in Egypt and we should have known it then. It's about exactly what's happening, how we can disregard public opinion as long as the dictators we support are capable of suppressing their populations. So to hell with public opinion. That's all right there in the 1950's. That's not security. That's not security of the government. That's, if anything, security from its own population. And there's a lot of that.”

“We got the first WikiLeaks publication of documents hacked and stolen by Russian government sources from the DNC, from the Democratic Party, and they started publishing those stolen documents from the DNC right before the Democrats started their convention.Good political timing if you`re trying to help [Donald] Trump and hurt the Democrats.”

“If [Pope's Francis] media-generated popularity, fragile as that may turn out to be when the world discovers that the pope is really a Catholic, opens windows of possibility for explaining that divine mercy leads us to the truths God revealed to us (and inscribed into the world and into us), then his reanimation of the papacy will advance the "Church in permanent mission" for which he called in Evangelii Gaudium, which is the grand strategy document of his pontificate.”

“There's the trope about an impending "global-warming encyclical." The pope is preparing an encyclical on nature and the environment, including the human environment (which includes the moral imperative of a culturally affirmed and legally recognized right to life from conception until natural death). So what happens? A low-ranking Vatican official for self-promotion gives an interview to the Guardian in which he claims that this is a global-warming encyclical - which he couldn't possibly have known, as the document wasn't drafted yet.”

“When climate change gets some attention in a 100-page document, the most important parts of which will have to do with the theology of stewardship and the theology of "human ecology," it's almost certainly going to be rapturously embraced, or bitterly opposed, as a "global-warming encyclical," despite the evidence that it's much more broadly gauged than that.”

“I went off to college, a good, middle-class, very proper college, a Brethren institution, where two years of Bible study are required for graduation. It was a good, sound, thorough, but completely biased evaluation of the Bible, and I was delighted with it, because it helped to document my doubts; it gave me a framework within which I could be critical.My independent study continued for 20 years after this. So I do know the Bible very well from a Protestant point of view.”

“In fact, it was stated early in the first Bush [presidency], Bush I, in one of their documents they pointed out in the future, US wars are going to be against much weaker enemies. And they have to be won quickly and decisively before a popular reaction develops. And Iif you take a look, that's what's done. Look at Panama, for instance, over a couple of days; and Kosovo, no American troops.”

“As editor of WikiLeaks, I am very proud of three things. Number one, we have never got it wrong in terms of what we say. A document is what it is. Number two, we have never revealed one of our sources ever. Number three, what are we proud of? We are proud that there is not a single instance of anyone coming into physical harm as a result of our publication.”

“The founding document of the United States of America acknowledges the Lordship of Jesus Christ because we are a Christian nation.”