When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil.

War is good when good survives and evil is crushed. If you don't crush evil then evil will get you.

After the war, in which I served as a pilot in the Air Force, I took up films.

The script was always the most important thing to me and I loved the script. For one thing, I've always admired trees. I just worship them. Think what trees have witnessed, what history, such as living through the Civil War, yet they still survive.

If a war be undertaken... before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.

And so, the youngsters you have today, even though there are far fewer of them - in World War II 16.5 million men and women in uniform, today roughly a million in uniform in spite of the fact that the country is almost twice as large a population as we had in World War II.

And of course there is so much of World War II that is documented that we never have seen.

In World War II, the book you have in front of you, it was said and it is probably true, that there was not a single American who did not know the name of somebody serving in uniform.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.

My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.

I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war.

During practically all of my public life, I have been a sincere advocate of an agreement between the leading nations of the world to set up all the necessary international machinery that would bring about a practical abolition of war between civilized nations.