“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.
Category: Lit & Crit
“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 early Christians were (in the strictly technical sense) communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days are in fact taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime.” – Richard Bentley Hart, “Introduction” to The New Testament: A Translation (emphasis in original)
“‘Knowledge is power,’ but to a degree only. Its possession per se will raise a man to mediocrity, but not to distinction.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “The Secret of Victory”
“The quickest way to get to heaven is to advance across open ground swept by effective enemy anti-tank fire.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “Use of Armored Formations, Letter of Instruction No. 3, 20 May 1944 ”
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” – attributed to Valery Legasov, in Chernobyl, by Craig Mazin
“Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write.” – Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella”
“Memoir is literature and literature is art and in art you must seek to illuminate something.” – Jo Ann Beard (interviewed by Susan Lerner in Booth 19)
“The trouble with English speakers was that they always made you wait for the noun.” – Rachel Salguero Kowalsky, “The Delivery Boy”
“Childlike creativity is wonderful because it knows no boundaries and borders. As we grow older, we acquire boundaries and borders, rules and etiquette, concepts regarding what we shouldn’t say or do. That’s useful, obviously, but it can kill creativity, you know? And creativity, I think, is partly about seeing the world without any kind of limitation.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen (interviewed by Jennifer Delgado in Booth 19)
“I think most kids are naturally creative—it’s life that beats the creativity out of people.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen (interviewed by Jennifer Delgado in Booth 19)
“Well, I stared into the abyss, as they say, and the abyss stared back into me. Then it got bored and left. So here I am!” – Paul Lamb, Parent Imperfect
“We are pathologically linguistic. We chop the world up into propositions and, if we’re not careful, examine those rather than the world itself.” – Charles Foster, “The Soliloquies of the Lambs”
“Marriage is not to be undertaken frivolously; it requires a mature, fully developed dependency and a vast capacity for endurance.” – Valerie Solanas, “Up You Ass”
“I talk to men on their level; I have virile, potent, sophisticated interests—I adore positions of intercourse, Keynesian economics, and I can look at dirty pictures for hours on end.” – Valerie Solanas, “Up Your Ass”
“I am 60 years old and can give you some advice. Never commit a crime against anybody whatsoever. That’s how you’ll grow old with clean hands.” – Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog (trans. Avril Pyman)
“One has to know about food, and — can you imagine? — the majority of people do not. You don’t just have to know what to eat, but when and how.” – Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog (trans. Avril Pyman)
“There is cruelty and there is viciousness. Viciousness is the attack dog that hasn’t eaten in a week, and is drooling and barking and snarling. Cruelty is the person holding the leash.” – Amanda Long Chu, “I Want a Critic” (interview by Merve Emre)
“An important factor enabling the Soviets to seize the offensive and retain it is Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease food and transport particularly have been vital factors in Soviet success. Combat aircraft, upon which the Soviet Air Forces relied so greatly, have been furnished in relatively great numbers (11,300 combat planes received). Should there be a full stoppage it is extremely doubtful whether Russia could retain efficiently her all-out offensive capabilities. Even defensively the supply of Lend-Lease food and transport would play an extremely vital role. It amounts to about a million tons a year. If Russia were deprived of it, Germany could probably still defeat the U.S.S.R. Lend-Lease is our trump card in dealing with U.S.S.R. and its control is possibly the most effective means we have to keep the Soviets on the offensive in connection with the second front.” – General George C. Marshall, from a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 31, 1944
“To establish a proper manpower balance for the United States in wartime was as difficult as it was important. The absolute ceiling on the number of men physically fit for active military service was estimated to be between fifteen and sixteen million. On the surface it was hard to understand, in the light of the available manpower pool, why there should be any U.S. manpower problem at all. Why, if Germany could maintain a military establishment of 9,835,000 or 10.9 percent of her population and Britain could support 3,885,000 or 8.2 percent of hers, did the United States manpower officials insist in late 1942 that 10,500,000 or only 7.8 percent would be the maximum force that the country could sustain without incurring serious dislocation to the American economy? The problem as well as the answer stemmed basically from the fact that the Allies had from the beginning accepted the proposition that the single greatest tangible asset the United States brought to the coalition in World War II was the productive capacity of its industry. From the very beginning, U.S. manpower calculations were closely correlated with the needs of war industry. The Army had therefore to compete for manpower not only with the needs of the other services but also with the claims of industry.” – Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare:1943-1944
“In recognition of the fact that wartime military planning was inextricably involved with foreign policy, the Army planners intensified their efforts from the spring of 1943 onward to improve liaison with the White House and State Department. By and large, the Army remained preoccupied both before and after the spring of 1943 with the more strictly military aspects of national policy. This reflected staff acceptance of the code, on which it had been working since before the war, that civilian authorities determine the ‘what’ of national policy and the military confine themselves to the ‘how.’ Yet it is also apparent that the fine line between foreign policy and military policy was becoming increasingly blurred as the war went on. The President felt compelled to take an active part in military affairs, and the Army staff found more and more that it could not keep foreign and political affairs out of its military calculations. It had become painfully clear to the staff since the summer of 1942 that political policy might not permit the armed forces to follow the quickest and most direct road to victory according to its lights.” – Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare:1943-1944
“They swarmed down upon us like locusts with a plentiful supply of planners and various other assistants with prepared plans to insure that they not only accomplished their purpose but did so in stride and with fair promise of continuing in their role of directing strategically the course of this war. I have the greatest admiration, . . . and if I were a Britisher I would feel very proud. However, as an American I wish that we might be more glib and better organized to cope with these super negotiators. From a worm’s eye viewpoint it was apparent that we were confronted by generations and generations of experience in committee work and in rationalizing points of view. They had us on the defensive practically all the time.” – General Albert C. Wedemeyer, January 22, 1943 (as quoted by Maurice Matloff in Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare:1943-1944)
“You never know just who you’ll run into in a graveyard.” – Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel
“The measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” – Jim Vance (as quoted by J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy)
“There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.” – Bonnie Blanton (as quoted by J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy)
“One of the many unhappy oddities of the contemporary United States is that so many of us are Bible-obsessed yet have never read the Bible.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium
“It is only when all sides of an issue are forcefully presented and the various solutions thereof closely scrutinized that the final plan has any validity.” – Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward, U.S.A., The War Department: Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942, United States Army in World War Two
“The common ground of shamanistic dreams and voyages is the ultimate human desire: survival in the confrontation with death. Theologians work at doubtless higher levels, but the Jesus of the people, almost everywhere, is the universal shaman. This may not be against the genius of Christianity, but it certainly is against the teaching of Catholicism and the mainline Protestant churches. Resurrection for these does not follow the pattern of Jesus, whose ascension in those traditions was viewed as a kind of promissory note for the vast resurrection someday to come, or perhaps more as a first installment.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium (emphasis in original)
“Psychoanalysis was and is a shamanism; its affiliations with occultism or parapsychology are far more authentic than its supposed links to biology, as a discipline. Freud kept hoping that psychoanalysis would make a contribution to biology, but this was an absurd wish. Though it is an ideology that exalts fact, Freud’s creation is a mythology, reared upon the central myths of the drives of love and death. In the longest perspective its deepest affinities are with the pre-Socratic shaman Empedocles, whose vision of incessant strife emerges again in the Freudian tragic view of a civil war in the individual psyche.” – Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium