“New Georgia lacked the drama of the early months of Guadalcanal and the awesome scope of later battles in the Central Pacific. Instead, it was characterized by a considerable amount of fumbling, inconclusive combat; and the final triumph was marred by the fact that a number of command changes were required to insure the victory. There were few tactical or strategic successes and the personal hardships of a rigorous jungle campaign were only underscored by the planning failures.” – Maj. Douglas T. Kane, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “End of a Campaign,” Isolation of Rabaul, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. II
Month: September 2024
“Breakfast on the morning of the 10th was not a problem for the raiders who had not eaten since the morning of the 9th. There was no food.” – Maj. Douglas T. Kane, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “The Dragons Peninsula Campaign: Capture of Enogai,” Isolation of Rabaul, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. II
“Western culture, if it is to survive its current self-hatred, must become only more Hamlet-like. We have no equally powerful and influential image of human cognition pushed to its limits; Plato’s Socrates comes closest. Both think too well to survive.” – Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“I don’t fear things that will only kill me. I don’t even fear things that will kill me and take out a city block. I fear most the things that will leave me alive in good health, and living with the terror of my continued existence.” – Matt Harbowy, “What Chemical Do Scientists Fear the Most?”
“Nature is a forgiving mistress, and you might could have some time to fill before she collects her due.” – Jody Worth, “A Lie Agreed Upon (Part II)”, Deadwood
“Each of us is a servile breath, a fool or victim, base, cowardly, sleepy, a concourse of atoms, caught between past and future in an illusory present, poor, moon-crazed, friendless, and subject to a thousand little deaths. We are our anxieties; no more, no less.” – Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Modern war with its extravagant material factors places an especial importance upon a nation’s economic structure and particularly upon its ‘industrial web.’ A nation may be defeated simply by the interruption of the delicate balance of this complex organization, which is vulnerable to the air arm and directly to neither of the other arms. It is possible that a moral collapse brought about by disturbances in this close-knit web may be sufficient to force an enemy to surrender.” – James Lea Cate and Wesley Frank Craven, “The Army Air Arm Between Two Wars, 1919-39,” The Army Air Forces in World War II
“Of the roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders, 216 survived the battle to be taken prisoner, and an estimated 3,000 went into hiding during the U.S. occupation of the island. By August 1945, most of these had either been killed, captured, or had surrendered, but one group did not lay down its arms until 1949.” – Carsten Fries, “Battle of Iwo Jima”
“I wouldn’t trust a man that wouldn’t try to steal a little.” – Elizabeth Sarnoff, “Suffer the Little Children,” Deadwood
“Some goddamned time a man’s due to stop arguin’ with hisself. Feeling he’s twice the goddamned fool he knows he is. Because he can’t be somthin’ he tries to be every goddamned day without once getting to dinnertime and not fucking it up.” – Elizabeth Sarnoff, “Here Was a Man,” Deadwood
“People never prize what they have always had in abundance.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Trousseau” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.” – Anton Chekhov, “A Living Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“Blind love finds ideal beauty everywhere.” – Anton Chekhov, “A Living Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“In a starfish, none of the separate arms knows what the others are up to or what is happening to them. There is no integration at a neural level. Or consider an image on your computer screen; each pixel is quite independent from the pixels around it; you can change one without altering the others. Human beings are very different. Change one neuron and changes will occur in hundreds if not thousands of others. Read about Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, or Proust’s Marcel in La Recherche and you’ll see that everything that happens to them is immediately mixed up with everything else. Everything connects. A human being is the ultimate causal Gordian knot. You can’t disentangle it.” – Riccardo Manzotti, “Does Information Smell?”
“Few among us are qualified to testify as to whether God is dead, or alive, or wandering somewhere in exile (the possibility I tend to favor).” – Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“We are lived by drives we cannot command.” – Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“You never regret being kind. I really believe that. I have regretted being sarcastic. I have regretted losing my temper. But I’ve never regretted being kind.” – Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (interviewed by Nancy Kaffer, Detroit Free Press, July 7, 2024)
“We do not verify the hypotheses of science; instead, if we have any intellectual honour, we do our level best to disconfirm even our own theories. The process is Darwinian: the properly successful scientific theories are the ones that have survived, by a kind of logical natural selection.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“The universe is indefinitely recessive to the understanding. It will not provide the thing that philosophers cannot help pursuing: The Answer.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“No man is called happy till his death, and all the taxes at his wake and funeral paid.” – Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book III, “Cadmus” (trans. Horace Gregory)
“The approach to nothingness is exciting, but nothingness itself is boring and featureless.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment the hero or anti-hero, Raskolnikov, has been brooding on the more frightening implications of Utilitarian ethics. Russian Utilitarianism is a more violent affair than its English counterpart: if the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the sole criterion of ethical behaviour, the Ten Commandments no longer hold. It is right to kill if this killing is the only way to prevent two other people from being killed. Even, say, torturing a child to death could be right, if one knew that it was the only to prevent the torturing to death of two other children. Truly independent spirits can rise above biblical morality and, when necessary, spill blood.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“When the Christians were an underground sect, meeting in catacombs in Rome, they could afford to be absolutely merciful because the non-Christian Roman cops would deal with anything really nasty. Then the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity and suddenly the cops were Christians.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“If one has a system of immense rewards in heaven for good behaviour in this world, then that good behaviour, once the agent has become aware of the reward, will cease to be innocently disinterested.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“We can never surrender to democracy’s enemies. We can never allow America to be defined by forces of division and hatred. We can never go backward in the progress we have made through the sacrifice and dedication of true patriots. We can never and will never relent in our pursuit of a more perfect union, with liberty and justice for all Americans.” – Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Chairman, Final Report, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
“Forbidden books always acquire an attractive immortality of their own, quite apart from whatever merits they contain.” – Horace Gregory, “Introduction,” Ovid: The Metamorphoses
“The future of humanity is simple. You have a choice—you have Star Trek or Mad Max. Those are your options. We can explore the heavens, or we can stay here and kill each other over books written about heaven.” – Justin King, “The Roads to Planetary Defense, Asteroids, and NASA,” June 27, 2024
“The nineteenth century, even among its poets, lost contact with The Metamorphoses, or rather, The Metamorphoses showed aspects of mythology as well as human conduct that the age did not care to advertise. An extremely un-Italian Victorian Olympus came into view. It had been introduced by Lord Elgin’s marbles shipped from Greece to London. Pictorially and in sculpture the nymphs and goddesses became ideal English girls, represented in dreamy yet modest poses by Sir Frederic Leighton; they looked freshly bathed, well-fed, and nearly sexless.” – Horace Gregory, “Introduction,” Ovid: The Metamorphoses
“When the Protestants abolished Purgatory they had nothing left beyond the grave but heaven, from which no soul would wish to return, and hell, from which no one could escape.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“Patience is the honest man’s revenge.” – Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy