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"Srebrenica was a horrendous war crime and it had to be uncovered."
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"I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind."

"The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion."

"That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians."

"So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community and until an equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way."

"In the matter of war, ask this question to yourself and to your own fellow country men: Have you ever seen any politician in your country without legs, without arms, without eyes after war? No! You can't see such a thing because honourless politicians always stay in the safe ports while they send others to the zone of death!"

"War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves."

"War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it."
Explore more quotes by John Pomfret

"Working overseas is more difficult in that it's much more complicated to get people to open their hearts to you and to tell you information."

"In some ways the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything."

"But on the other hand, in the midst of the chaos, you find normal people. You find people who are willing to risk their lives to tell you what they saw, even though they have no dog in the fight."

"I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China."

"I was posted to China in the summer of 1988, which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China."

"And when they do spin out of control there are important ramifications that affect America, not just its direct national interest but its broader interests as a nation which has thought of itself as a beacon to other nations, of freedom, liberty, democracy, whatever."

"I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences."

"A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life."

"For me the much more significant question is what did the Americans do, if anything, to help the Croatian army, because they are the ones that changed fundamentally the map of Bosnia, not the Bosnian army."
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