Line of Sight Quotes

“Only cowards hid their faces at public protests. Or criminals.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan with their billion-dollar bombers and lasers and drones, who is still in charge of the Afghan countryside? The illiterate peasant with his two-hundred-dollar rifle.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“A democracy cannot survive identity politics. Bosnians must think of themselves as Bosnian, first and always. All religions are respected in your country, and everybody has equal rights, and there has been peace. But all of that is at risk if ethnic identity trumps democratic ideals.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“It’s amazing how many ‘poor’ congressmen become millionaires while in public service,”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“New Generation warfare was a multidimensional, nonlinear strategy that engineered and exploited social, moral, ethnic, and political tensions within a target country.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“New Generation warfare was a multidimensional, nonlinear strategy that engineered and exploited social, moral, ethnic, and political tensions within a target country. It included arming and training local civilians as paramilitary units, often seeded and even led by Russian Spetsnaz special operators posing as civilian fighters. New Gen warfare also appealed to ethnic unity, and against ethnic discrimination by the local government, and pushed those narratives out into the public arena through sophisticated mass media campaigns and “fake news.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“But once people started saying, ‘I’m a Serb,’ or ‘I’m a Muslim,’ all of a sudden people started seeing their neighbors as ‘others,’ and all of their problems were because of ‘them.’ Democracy and identity politics don’t work so well together.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“most of them were poseurs who preferred protesting to the actual heavy lifting of making the world a better place.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“dysfunctional swamp of unscrupulous self-interest known as Washington, D.C., was considerably less than perfect,”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“every war the Americans have lost—Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and, yes, Afghanistan—has been lost to technologically inferior opponents.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“The trick with commercial aviation travel, he’d learned over the past few years, was to keep your expectations low and to relax.”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“them, indicating that they were leaving the Turkish side of the city and stepping into the Hapsburg side, the part of Sarajevo built during the Austro-Hungarian”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are’?”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight

“History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes?”
― Mike Maden, Line of Sight