“As much as people love to use the Founding Fathers as a reason why the youths these days can’t wear lipstick and listen to horny pop music, everything we know about history leads us to the expectation that Benjamin Franklin would probably actually fucking love it here today.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route
Author: Tetman Callis
“The Confederacy was not just a separatist movement, it was an existential threat to the very idea of freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—it could not be abided, and that conflict left so many dead that the streets of Gettysburg were once littered with so many corpses that it was weeks getting them into the mass graves. The town was covered in the rotting dead and the stench of them, all lying underneath the Pennsylvania sun. . . . a town where, once the armies moved on to fight again elsewhere, there weren’t enough people left alive to wash the blood from the streets and the gore from the walls—that’s what civil war means.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route (emphasis in original)
“Foreign policy isn’t fair. It’s not fair for politicians, either.” – Justin King, “The Roads Not Taken, Ep 38,” Beau of the Fifth Column, May 12, 2024
“The government’s greatest power to change the landscape isn’t with bulldozing or bombs, it’s the ability to transform nature into squares, with a simple stroke of the pen.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route
“The problem with history is that it’s full of incredible jokes that take too damn long to set up.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route
“Saloon is a sanctuary. Every man worth the name knows the value of being unreachable.” – David Milch, Deadwood
“He farting from the bathroom, she farting from the bedroom, like two mooses calling in the night.” – Lydia Davis, “May, Excerpts from a Journal, January to June, 1997 ”
“Sometimes I’m grateful that no one uses my washcloth. And that I can go to the store and buy brand new sponges at any time . . .” – Lydia Davis, “March, Excerpts from a Journal, January to June, 1997 ” (ellipsis and emphasis in original)
“1 B-17, upon an alleged submarine sighting, drops 4 depth charges and 1 bomb whereupon a whale breaks water. Weather cancels other missions.” – Eleventh Air Force Operations, January 30, 1943, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, Combat Chronology (compiled by Kit C. Carter & Robert Mueller)
“I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.” – Eckhart Tolle
“Early and medieval Christians assumed female hysterics were possessed by the devil and utilized a combination of prayer, exorcism, and torture to cure them. Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, scholars and physicians more benignly concluded that hysteria was a mental disease, properly ameliorated by regular marital sex, frequent pregnancy, childbirth, daily orgasms, and the occasional rest cure. By the early twentieth century, female hysteria encompassed a burgeoning range of symptoms, including compulsive speech or muteness, inappropriate movement or paralysis, deafness, hallucinations, anxiety, insomnia, fainting, amnesia. Severely affected patients were hospitalized or institutionalized, treated with hypnosis, physical restraints, and pelvic massage to induce climax.” – Anne Kenner, “Saying It”
“Ambition and the blessed simplicities of action don’t always quarter in comfort.” – Regina Corrado and Ted Mann, “True Colors,” Deadwood
“To work for crumbs or to keep from the lash says maybe a slave’s what you are.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“Change ain’t lookin’ for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“People don’t vote based on foreign policy. They really don’t. It’s not a major issue for most people. You will have some. When I say ‘people,’ just understand that that’s a generalization. But most time, people vote based on ‘the pebble in their shoe’.” – Justin King, “Let’s talk about intersections, politics, and the pebble in your shoe . . .”, Beau of the Fifth Column, April 26, 2024
“Artificial Intelligence will never catch up to Natural Stupidity.” – Rooster Cogburn, Wonkette, April 26, 2024
“No nation is rich enough or productive enough to supply and maintain battlefronts where there is no longer a battle.” – War Department “Reports on Overseas Construction” (quoted by Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943)
“Luke’s description in Acts of the early church’s communism of goods in Jerusalem is one that good Christians have striven heroically for the better part of two millennia to pretend not to notice.” – David Bentley Hart, “Notes on Authorship,” The New Testament: A Translation
“Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.” – Jody Worth, “E. B. Was Left Out,” Deadwood
“The Creator, in His infinite wisdom, salted His works so that where gold was, there also you’d find rumor. Though He decreed just as firm that the opposite wouldn’t always hold.” – Ted Mann, “Requiem for a Gleet,” Deadwood
“Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.” – Ted Mann, “Sold Under Sin,” Deadwood
“I mean, you—you gotta behave like a grown fuckin’ man, huh? You gotta shut the fuck up. Don’t be sorry, don’t look fuckin’ back, because . . . believe me, no one gives a fuck.” – Ricky Jay, “Jewel’s Boot Is Made for Walking,” Deadwood
“As a base of operations, you cannot beat a fuckin’ saloon.” – Malcolm MacRury, “Plague,” Deadwood
“Rarely, accidental deaths occur when a car is started and left running in a garage to warm up while the driver goes back to the house. Carbon monoxide from the exhaust then leaks into the house, killing the residents. Occasionally, someone commits suicide in a garage by leaving the car running, and at the same time inadvertently kills the occupants of the house as well.” – Dominick J. Di Maio & Vincent J. M. Di Maio, Forensic Pathology
“During the first nineteen months of its participation in World War II, the U.S. Army purchased almost 950,000 trucks, nineteen times the number it had procured during the corresponding period of World War I. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day it procured for its own and Allied forces some 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, 350,000 artillery pieces, .5 billion rounds of ground artillery ammunition, 41 billion rounds of small arms ammunition. It shipped overseas 127 million measurement tons of cargo, and 7.3 million troops and other passengers.” – Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943
“It is better and cheaper to have a strong Army and not need it than it is to need a strong Army and not have it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“Any politician should be put in jail who votes for an appropriation bill and fails to vote the tax to pay for it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“I can see it in a vision. It comes to haunt me at night. I am standing there knee deep in the water and all around me as far as the eye can see are dead men, floating like a school of dynamited fish. They are all floating face up with their eyes wide open and their skins a ghastly white. They are looking at me as they float by and they are saying, ‘Patton, you bastard, it’s your fault. You did this to me. You killed me.’” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“The unleavened bread of knowledge will sustain life, but it is dull fare unless it is leavened with the yeast of personality.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“You are not beaten until you admit it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.