5 Quotes & Sayings By Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson, Ph.D. is Professor of Classics and Military History at the University of California, San Diego. He has also taught at Boston University, the University of New Mexico, the University of Colorado, and Claremont McKenna College. In 2003, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in classical studies from the John D Read more

and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2004 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and in 2005 he won the Charles Frankel Prize from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs for his work on America's enemies in the War on Terror.

He is a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Hanson has written twelve books including The Western Way: Theiserical Tradition in America (with Aaron Wildavsky), The Battle for Spain: How FDR's Good Allies Lost Their War (with Stephen Haycraft), "The Rise to World Power: Asiatic Germany between Revolutions," "The War that Hitler Won," "The Land beside the River: Travels in the American Southwest," "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad," "In Turmoil and Troubles: Essays on War and Peace," "The Age of Anxiety: A History of America Now," and "Forged in War: The Making of America's Military Elite."

1
The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272) . Victor Davis Hanson
2
Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes – affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism – the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response. Victor Davis Hanson
3
This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship–replete with ever more rights and responsibilities–would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122) . Victor Davis Hanson
4
Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether. Victor Davis Hanson