“In order to bring a nation to support the burdens incident to maintaining great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to war psychology. There must be the portrayal of an external menace or of internal conditions rendered intolerable by the unjust restraints of foreign nations. This involves the development to a high degree of the nation-hero nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of the duty of sacrifice.”
John Foster Dulles
“A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.”
Will Durant