Bruce Jackson

“War is big and there are only so many reporters and only so many places for their words and images to appear. Choices are made constantly.”

“Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.”

“I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.”

“The fact that the Arctic, more than any other populated region of the world, requires the collaboration of so many disciplines and points of view to be understood at all, is a benefit rather than a burden.”

“America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.”

“Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.”

“They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.”

“The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.”

“Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.”

“When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.”

“The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.”

“Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.”

“It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.”

“For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.”

“War is an abstraction.”

“First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.”