Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.
Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
– General Douglas MacArthur, A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1965)
Words of the Sentient 