“The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States. What might have been for Warren Earl, Dick, Marve, Glenn, Floyd, Jimmy, the unidentified airman, and all the Others who had lost their lives?...And what might have been for those millions of doomed Japanese boys, abused and abandoned by their leaders? War is the tragedy of what might have been.”

“In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.”

“There have been those among us who have been so dazzled by the might and technological wizardy of Europe that they have been rather a man who stands lost in admiration at the gun that is raised to shoot him.”

“i will always remember what my life might have been like if i had married a man who loved me with undying passion. perhaps i might not have been so vunerabel to the attension of a rake. ”

“We can't live our lives according to what might have been. We have to live by what is.”

“if you'd like it put more simply---Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”