“It has been said whoever possesses Iceland holds a pistol firmly pointed at England, America, and Canada.” – Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance
“We really do not know what happens to life’s sorrows after death, especially those last moments of suffering, it is possible that everything ends with death but we cannot be certain that the memory of suffering does not linger at least for several hours in this body we describe as dead, nor can we rule out the possibility that matter uses putrefaction as a last resort in order to rid itself of suffering.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Were we humans as foolhardy or daring as those butterflies, moths, and other winged insects, to throw ourselves all together onto the flames, then who knows, perhaps the blaze would be so fierce and the light so dazzling that God would open His eyes and be roused from His torpor, too late, of course, to recognize us, but in time to see the impending void once we had gone up in smoke.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“We say, Only yesterday, and we might as well say, A thousand years ago, for time is not a rope one can measure from knot to knot, time is a slanted and undulating surface which only memory can stir and bring closer.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“One day we a shall learn not to raise useless questions but until that day comes let us take this opportunity to ask ourselves, What will this new dawn bring.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“The Spanish-American War signalized emergence of the United States as a world power. Possession of the Philippines caused the Navy to reappraise the whole Far East situation. The USS Charleston, convoying Army troops to Manila, paused en route to seize the Spanish island of Guam to serve as an advanced coaling station. Seizure of Guam required no landing force. The Spanish governor had not learned about the declaration of war and mistook the token naval bombardment for a courtesy salute and hurried out to the Charleston to apologize for his inability to return it for lack of ammunition. He promptly surrendered the island upon being apprised of the facts.” – Lt. Col. Frank O. Hough, USMCR, Maj. Verle E. Ludwig, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “Origins of a Mission,” Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. I
“There are always options other than kicking in the front door.” – Justin King, “The Roads to a Q&A on Verdict Watch Day,” Beau of the Fifth Column, May 30, 2024
“When you ask Americans when the country was at its best according to different metrics, people reliably tend to answer the first decade of their life.” – Gabe Fleisher, “Was American Politics Ever Normal?”, Wake Up to Politics, May 29, 2024
“People don’t choose their dreams. Dreams choose people.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“6/9/45—Eleventh Air Force—In coordination with Navy surface and air forces attacking in the Kurils, 6 B-24’s and 8 B-25’s fly extensive armed weather recon and anti-shipping sweeps over Kurabu and Otomari Capes, Ichinowatashi, and Asahigawa. The B-24’s score no results, half of them jettisoning their bombs. The B-25’s then fly a diversionary bombing mission over Araido where they are attacked by 8 Japanese fighters. To evade them, the B-25’s fly over Kamchatka where Soviet anti-aircraft fire shoots down one, killing its crew. Another damaged B-25 crash-lands in Petropavlovsk. This is the first time Soviet anti-aircraft hits a U.S. aircraft.” – Kit C. Carter and Robert Mueller, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II Combat Chronology, 1941 – 1945
“6/7/45—Twelfth Air Force—Major Gustav M. Minton, Jr., takes command of XXII Tactical Air Command, which ceases to function.” – Kit C. Carter and Robert Mueller, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II Combat Chronology, 1941 – 1945
“To speak of yesterday, today, and tomorrow is simply to give different names to the same illusion.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“While we are all made from the same all too human substance, the same flesh, bones, blood, skin and laughter, tears and sweat, some of us become cowards and others heroes, some are aggressive and others pacifists.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“The time for miracles has either passed or has not yet come, and besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means distorting logic and the very nature of things in order to prove them.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Conflicts between fathers and sons, the inheritance of guilt, the disavowal of kith and kin, the sacrifice of innocents, go back a long way in time and promise to be endless.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“In truth I say unto you that many things in this world could be known before it is too late, if husbands and wives were only to confide in each other as husbands and wives.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Life chooses itself for us, without asking for our consent to its decisions.” – Mikhail Iossel, “All of It”
“Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.” – Henry James, Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William (quoted in José Donoso, El obsceno pajaro de la noche)
“Good and Evil do not exist in themselves, each is simply the absence of the other.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Ninth Air Force – A XIX Tactical Air Command squadron uniquely effects surrender of a number of German ground troops. Germans on roads being strafed by the squadron northeast of Carrouges, France, wave white flags, whereupon planes buzz the road and shepherd enemy troops into a column which then proceeds to US lines to surrender.” – Kit C. Carter and Robert Mueller, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II Combat Chronology, 1941 – 1945
“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
“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