“A criminal citing any reason or religious text for his or her crime does not make that atrocious act less criminal, nor does it make those who take the classical sources and tradition seriously somehow implicitly connected to what is being done.” – Dr. Hatem Bazian, “ISIS’s compounded ignorance is criminal but not a theology”
“Perfection is not what holds a family together; the bond forged through shared struggle is what endures over the long haul.” – Jessica Lahey, The Gift of Failure
“The worst kind of controlling parenting is the type that either withholds affection or makes it contingent on performance. This kind of parenting hits kids where they are most vulnerable: their basic sense of safety and fear of abandonment. Even subtle withdrawal has a deleterious effect on children’s sense of security.” – Jessica Lahey, The Gift of Failure
“Rewards work for repetitive, uncomplicated, or boring tasks, but when it comes to creativity and nuanced learning, they are lousy motivators.” – Jessica Lahey, The Gift of Failure
“Before I joined the army I’d’ve thought it was certain death to dig a hole in the back garden and live in it for the winter, but that’s what we did. The sergeant said, ‘Well, squirrels do it every year.’ ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘but they don’t man machine guns as well.’ ” – Unidentified British soldier, The True Glory
“Virtue for virtue’s sake, faith without reason, art for art, and other purities of purpose will not suffice for happiness unless ideals can be betrayed on a regular basis.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“The greatest gift you can give another human being is to let them warm you till, in passing beyond pleasure, your defenses fall, your ego surrenders, its structure melts, its towers topple, lies, fancies, vanities, blow away in no wind, and you return, not to the clay you came from—the unfired vessel—but to the original moment of inspiration, when you were the unabbreviated breath of God.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Suppose a mad god in a fuss
went round the world on a bus,
and for each kiss he blew,
he ran over two;
what good would ensue? Please discuss.”
– William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“The automobile is the world’s most effective killing machine, with victims outnumbering any war, with millions maimed, shocked, crazed by the car, half the world trashed by its production, made brutal, ugly, used up, useless, with endless highways and hospitals to maintain, most citizens in debt to their eyes for this toy . . . . Mr. Hitler’s Holocaust can’t hold a candle. After all, his is kaput. This way to the gasoline, ladies and gentlemen.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“It is easy to be a victim, you don’t have to do a thing, you simply weep and bleed—but, ah, the beater, to be the beater is not a role whose easy mastery is readily admittable; sympathies in such a cause are not idly, not routinely, not frequently enlisted; and were they to be, what then?” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Sure, Adolf Hitler knew how to play the piano (badly), how to type (slowly), how to drive a car (erratically), how to draw (inadequately), how to write (drivel), how to remember (photographically), and how to bombast (beautifully). But bombast isn’t bombing. He was in fact a petty little twerp. A man of such meager means he could only wish the way the weasel wishes it were a looker like the tiger and a lord like the lion. What I wonder about are all of those who weren’t twerps who willed what Hitler wished, who pondered and planned and organized and sacrificed in order to establish the thousand-year Reich, who donned the uniforms and fired guns and made planes and prepared food and forged those famous chains of command, who invented and connived and lied and stole and killed, because they willed what the little twerp wished; they, who idolized a loud doll, who loved the twerps-truths, who carried out the wishes of a murderous fool, an ignoble nobody, a failure so unimportant that failure seems a fulsome description of him.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Slowly slime is covering the earth, more of it made every day—more whiny people, more filthy thoughts, crummy plans, cruddy things, contemptible actions—multiplying like evil spores (we were told to be fruitful, not to trash the place); so that now there are more artifacts and less art, more that is tame, little that is wild, more people, fewer species, more things, less world, more of the disappointment we all know so well, the defeats which devour us, the hours we spend with our heads buried in our books, blinding our eyes with used up words, while the misspending of our loins leads to more lives and less life—just think (we members of the better species) what divine sparks we might have played at being, and come and gone with spirit; instead, around us, as before, nobodies are killing nobodies for nothing.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Revolutionaries and other malcontents, because they are not in the place of power, or perhaps, in a nation, are the country’s restive minorities, or sometimes because they are spiteful courtiers out of favor: these desperadoes—sort of, aren’t they?—preach a rigid dogma to their followers, and wild relativism to the rest. Anarchists. Communists. Suffragettes. Separatists. Special pleaders. Splinter groups. Sects. The way they try to weaken official opposition, and get a hearing for themselves. Foxes make good chickens, the foxes say, pretending to cluck kindly in the direction of the henhouse. Then, having tempted tolerance to get in, their fangs vote.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Relativism as a theory really reflects an intellectual failure of nerve which is the result of Colonial guilt, commercial greed, the placation of the mob, and a total loss of taste.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, not.” – Council of Aragon Oath of Allegiance (J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716)
“Who of us has not destroyed our enemies in our heads. Suppose but a whisper of our wishes leaked out and half a continent was ready to rise and do your bidding? Orders are easy. Liquidate the trailer parks. Murder motorbikers. Silence the soaps. Clean up the town. Bust up the trusts. It is the killing—hands-on and nearby—that takes fortitude and commitment.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“History, I do believe, is not a mighty multitude of causes whose effects we suffer now in some imaginary present; it is rather that the elements of every evanescent moment endeavor to hitch a ride on something more permanent, living on in what lives on, lengthening their little life by clinging to a longer one, and in that manner, though perhaps quite unintentionally, attaching what will be to what still is (and so far has survived).” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“To be free is the greatest blessing the world never gives.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Death, they say, is democratic. Right? It makes no class distinctions: richer or poorer, better or worse, sick or well, white or black, jew or gentile; o mortal is mortal o, don’t we moan? and mother will go though she suckled us, and father will go though he paid our way, and brother will fall and sister sicken, the snow, the poet says, is subject to the same, the beauty of the breast, damp on a wet stoop, light on a bright day, look on a face, every strength of character, every vice, every species, every holy place, the list of the fragile even has its end, though the list is as long, o mortal is mortal as mortal o, as any which can be composed; whereas the momentary song, which seeks to save itself in memory, and reemerge through another’s tongue, on other lips, which infects mankind with its rhythms, meanings, metaphors, and rhymes, its sentiments and small desires, and tries to placate the implacable by praising it, fearing its powers, praying to its priests, crying mortal is mortal o mortal o, such a resourceful tune is doomed just as certainly as the solidist theory, the grandest design, the most convoluted plot, the simplest, plainest, purest line.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“It’s a war of lie against lie in this world where we are, fancy against fantasy, nightmare throttling nightmare like two wedded anacondas, and anyone who’s taken in is nothing but a bolo and a bumpkin. But that’s just exactly what we all are—hoddydoddies—aren’t we? Aren’t we all so hungry, anxious, eager to believe? like men in prison, aren’t we skinny to be screwed? and don’t we think that we’ve escaped to freedom when we drink our wits out, dance our reason loose, and crack our nuts between the fat legs of some four-mark whore?” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“To love is to trust another with your self-esteem. And then to see them measure you, to see the red line drop into the bulb at the bottom—my god, how you hate yourself, then, for the gift of your vanity, the care of your conceit! Think of it: you have given someone else the right to think ill of you.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel (emphasis in original)
“If we had the true and complete history of one man—which would be the history of his head—we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we’d encounter, the ever present dust.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Clashes are perfectly normal, what is the purpose of the pitiless bronze? certainly labor and management cheat one another—are suspicious, sullen, lazy, greedy, deceitful, Mafia-manipulated—you name it, no surprises, ordinary shiftlessness, ordinary exploitation, ordinary rapacity; physicians pill their poor patients to death and then bill the estates, which are already being fucked over by lawyers who specialize in quarrels and in quarreling: in instigating quarrels, nurturing and sustaining quarrels, in broadening quarrels, in aggravating and deepening them, in spelling quarrels (pretending the word needs no q, arguing against doubling the r), in quarreling among themselves then, in sucking quarrels so dry they whapper back and forth like sheets in the wind (whereas the Third Reich tried to eliminate quarrelsome elements, sought peace inside itself, sought to flatten fulminations); but no one likes their state, their place, or what they’re doing—the copper quarters their pockets, the two-dollar bill; thus riders kick their horses, peasants beat their oxen, dissociated personalities play mean pranks upon their not-so-innocent other selves; wars break out in the bleachers; psychoanalysts betray confidences and make out with their patients; journalists rake muck and ruin reputations; mystics and assorted fakes, lovers, men of the cloth, the soil, the sea: all go at it. The sparrows have learned from us how to fuss and sputter, squirrels saw away at their grievances; locusts stridulate; thorns prick; aspens clatter. What a world!” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“What will we do when we lose the war? Prepare for the next one.” – Julius J. Epstein, Cross of Iron
“Each generation will rewrite history in its own image.” – Halvard Leira, “International Relations Pluralism and History—Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession”
“Amateurism is obviously differentiated from professionalism, but the criteria for differentiation here is not payment or quality. What distinguishes an amateur is not that he or she is not paid, nor that he or she is doing something in an inexpert way. Rather, the central notion of amateurism is the motivation to engage in a game or other practice for the sake of the game or practice itself. An amateur does what he or she does because of a love of the activity. There is no denying that amateurism carries a certain leisure-class connotation. A discourse of amateurism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, replete with clearly observable practices of rule making, exclusion and inclusion; amateurism was used by the elites to exclude and differentiate themselves from anyone engaged in manual labor.” – Halvard Leira, “International Relations Pluralism and History—Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession” (internal quotes and cites omitted)
“Disciplinary boundaries and boundary-keeping circumscribe which channels of publication are seen as relevant and also where specific types of work will be acceptable. Hence, they are also ultimately decisive for the possibilities of getting tenure and promotion.” – Halvard Leira, “International Relations Pluralism and History—Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession”
“Lay the length of a lasting love alongside any hate, that of the Armenians, for instance, the Turks for the Greeks, the Serbs for everybody. Do you suppose if the Armenians had been done a good turn back then, instead of being thinned, they would remember? three square meals and clean clothes in corded bales and darned blankets and bandages and modern medicines for their festers and their flu? would such deeds be held tenderly against generations of grateful hearts? No one would think so. No one. No.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“Who wants to stir up even a chicken if it hankers to be a snake?” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel
“I know that men are capable of anything; that all of the things possible to men are therefore possible for me. There is no final safety from oneself.” – William H. Gass, The Tunnel