Book Quotes and Passages

B

Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with new ones.
Bierce, Ambrose
The Devil's Dictionary

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Bierce, Ambrose
The Devil's Dictionary

War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.
Bobbitt, Philip
The Shield of Achilles

Juarez is one of the world centers of this vigorous business. It is a model of the New Economy, stateless, borderless, global. It rewards merit, ignores class origins, hires and fires at will. It despises regulations and ducks tariffs. It is color-blind and judges the work, not the skin color.
Two thirds of the streets in Juarez are unpaved.
Bowden, Charles
Down By The River

Always, it is really the same: Outside forces are causing our misery and this reality explains why there is such suffering and also that Mexico matters, matters enough to have a host of foreign and occult enemies.
Bowden, Charles
Down By The River

In California, Frank noticed, “east” was synonymous with certain things, like “education” or as Boyd put it, “learning shit.”
Buckley, Christopher
Boomsday: A Novel

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.
Byron, Lord George Gordon
Don Juan

C

"Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...no, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone..."
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness

"Often, when a man is young and idealistic, he believes that if he works hard and does the right thing, success will follow. This was what Boyd's mother and childhood mentors told him. But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military's value system. Those who do not conform will one day realizes that the path of doing the right thing has diverged from the path of success, and then they much decide which path they will follow through life."
Coram, Robert
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

"Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road," he said. "And you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go." He raised his hand and pointed. "If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments." Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. "Or you can go that way and you can do something--for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. "To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"
Coram, Robert
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

"Generating a rapidly changing environment--that is, engaging in actively that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy--inhibits the adversary's ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives."
Coram, Robert
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

D

The way circus elephants are trained demonstrates this dynamic well: When young, they are attached by heavy chains to large stakes driven deep into the ground. They pull and yank and strain and struggle, but the chain is too strong, the stake too rooted. One day they give up, having learned they cannot pull free, and from that day forward they can be "chained" with a slender rope. When this enormous animal feels any resistance, thought it has the strength to pull the whole circus tent over, it stops trying. Because it believes it cannot, it cannot.

This opera is being sung in homes all over America right, the stakes driven in to the ground, the heavy chains attached, the children reaching the point they believe they cannot pull free. And at that point, they cannot.
De Becker, Gavin
The Gift of Fear

F

Staring down at the water, I measured my words, running through a justification I’d given myself a thousand times before. The good was abstract. The good didn’t feel as good as the bad felt bad. It wasn’t the good that kept me up at night.

“You sound so unprincipled,” she said, shaking her head. “Why can’t you find peace in what you and your men sacrificed so much to do? Why can’t you be proud?

I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home. I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn't beat us. I hope life improves for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but that's not why we did it. We fought for each other.

I am proud.
Fick, Nathaniel
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer

I was frustrated as much by respect and attempts at understanding as by unfeeling ignorance. The worst were blanket accolades and thanks from people “for what you guys did over there.” Thanks for what, I wanted to ask – Shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people’s homes? There wasn’t any pride in simply being there. The pride was in our good decisions, in the things we did right. I hoped that I’d done more right than wrong, hoped that I hadn’t been cavalier with people’s lives. I was learning that sometimes the only way to fight evil is with another evil, however good its aim.
Fick, Nathaniel
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer

" A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired'"
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning--
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby

G

If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.
Gladwell, Malcolm
The Tipping Point

White-trash pathologies are almost never seen as a response to environmental factors, while the behavior of impoverished non-Euros is always viewed this way. There’s no shortage of socio-illogical alibis for any other group’s aberrant acts; with white trash, it’s seen as some form of innate rottenness. If you’re going to argue that rednecks simply don’t have the “right stuff” – that they breed violence, stupidity, and other undesirable character traits – you’re wandering into a eugenical argument and undermining any pretense toward liberalism or egalitarianism. If you embrace equality, sooner or later you’ll be forced to hug white trash, and don’t blame me if you can’t handle the smell.
Goad, Jim
The Redneck Manifesto

History itself is an endlessly unfolding S&M novel. History is much more sick, bloody, and unjust than historians will ever let on. When they finally get around to writing some real history, we’ll all need medication. It’ll be too depressing.
Goad, Jim
The Redneck Manifesto

Religion has always been a sponge mop to absorb class tensions. It’s a safety valve. Without it, class matters would come much more sharply into focus. Those who belittle pork-faced stupid rednecks and their primitive caveman religions should be HAPPY that the trash has been placated with false creeds and phony promises. For if these hardcore believers were ever to focus their gaze earthward, they might realize how badly they’ve been screwed and would turn from reactionary religion to radical politics.
Goad, Jim
The Redneck Manifesto

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of the future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

‘Love’s a Western word,’ I said. ‘We use it for sentimental reasons or to cover up an obsession with one woman. These people don’t suffer from obsessions. You’re going to be hurt, Pyle, if you aren’t careful.’
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Insanity is a kind of innocence.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

"And do you, Monseiur Fowlair, know who will trimuph? Surely someone you prefer?"
"I'm a reporter. We merely report exactly what we see. We don't take sides."
"But, you see, one has to take sides, if one is to remain human."
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

H

“Ask for my loyalty and I’ll give you my honesty. Ask for my honesty and you’ll have my loyalty.”
Hammond, Grant T.
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security

This gave Boyd a rather perverse glee in finding that all was not right with the world, for in that reality, he saw the possibility of continuing to improve it. He did not fall victim to the ultimate heresy of the Enlightenment, in believing in earthly perfection. He did not shrink from what he saw as the continuing need for improvement and adaptation. For Boyd, discontinuities were the norm and harmony the exception. That doesn’t mean we should seek to abolish discontinuities in pursuit of a widening gyre of harmony. It means rather that there is a sort of yin and yang balance between the two in the long run and that we are the agents of transformation among them. Humankind is responsible for much of the change that has been wrought on the planet, though by no means the bulk of it, thus it is incumbent on us to muddle through as best we can.
Hammond, Grant T.
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security

Boyd paid particular attention to the moral dimension and the effort to attack an adversary morally by showing the disjuncture between professed beliefs and deeds. The name of the game for a moral design for grand strategy is to use moral leverage to amplify one’s spirit and strength while exposing the flaws of competing adversary systems. In the process, one should influence the uncommitted, potential adversaries and current adversaries so that they are drawn toward one’s philosophy and are empathetic toward one’s success.
Hammond, Grant T.
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security

Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts—of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener—inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. When hopes and dreams are loose on the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows, and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. Though ours is a Godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. Whether we line up with him or against him, it is well we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

"When hopes and dreams are loose in the street, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed."
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

K

"I have seen something of this world," she said over the crowded trays, "and there are but two sorts of women in it - those who take the strength out of a man and those who put it back. Once I was that one, and now I am this."
Kipling, Rudyard
Kim

L

The Turks were stupid; the Germans behind them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

In a real sense, maximum disorder was our equilibrium.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

"Wall Street makes its best producers into managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers and they go after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers. Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get muscled out because of the politics. The guys left behind are the most ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street--because the ruthless people are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.
Lewis, Michael
Liar's Poker

The Piranha didn’t talk like a person. He said things like “If you fuckin’ buy this bond in a fuckin’ trade, you’re fuckin’ fucked.” And “If you don’t pay fuckin’ attention to the fuckin’ two-year, you get your fuckin’ face ripped off.” Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off. We had never before heard of people getting their faces ripped off. And he said it so often, like a nervous tic, that each time he said it again, the back row giggled. The Human Piranha, a Harvard graduate, thought nothing of it. He was always like this.
Lewis, Michael
Liar's Poker

If you wish for peace, understand war.
Liddell Hart, B.H.
Strategy: The Indirect Approach

M

I'm sorry, but I stand by my decision. I am now a member of the elite club of people that have fought a professional team mascot. You sir, are not in that club.
Max, Tucker
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

O

Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
O'Rourke, P.J
All the Trouble in the World

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport— two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners— two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom", a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions— North and South, black and white, labor and management— but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.
O'Rourke, P.J
Republican Party Reptile

Every generation finds the drug it needs.
O'Rourke, P.J
Republican Party Reptile

P

"Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple. Language, she said, was just a way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained or understood."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

Without access to true chaos we'll never have true peace.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

"I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise. In a way, being an addict is very proactive."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. You wake up, and that's enough.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Fight Club

"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution," Tyler whispered, "toward tragedy and dissolution"... "I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions," Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit"...
"The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Fight Club

"People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Survivor

"Reality means you live until you die," the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality"
Palahniuk, Chuck
Survivor

"I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.
The agent said that sounded pretty realistic."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Survivor

The conscious mind - the self or soul - is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. Often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Language is re-created every generation as it passed through the minds of the humans who speak it.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is inherent in all political systems. The major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend that there is no tradeoff.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale social organization our sorry species has come up with so far... this relative success of constitutional democracy... suggests that something may have been right about the theory of human nature that guided its architects.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Though there are many reasons why countries differ in their willingness to wage war, one factor is simply the proportion of the population that consists of men between the ages of 15 and 29.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Hobbes's observation that men fight over "a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue" is as true now as it was in the 17th century.
Because of the logic of deterrence, fights over personal or national honour are not as idiotic as they seem. Dialing 911 is an option not always available. It was not available to people in pre-state societies, or on the frontier in the Appalachians or the Wild West, or in the remote highlands of Scotland, or the Balkans.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Western societies are good at providing things that people want: clean water, effective medicine, varied and abundant food, rapid transportation and communication. They perfect these goods and services not from benevolence but from self-interest, for the profits to be made in selling them. Perhaps the aesthetics industry also perfected ways of giving people what they like - art forms that appeal to basic human tastes, such as calendar landscapes, popular songs, and Hollywood romances and adventures. So even if an art form matured in the West, it may be not an arbitrary practice spread by a powerful navy but a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

R

The psychologist William James argued a century ago that man had both more learning capacity and more instincts, rather than more learning and fewer instincts. He was ridiculed for this, but he was right.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Virtually all novels and plays are about the same subject, even when disguised as history or adventure. If you want to understand human motives read Proust, or Trollope, or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. We are obsessed with others' minds. Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy. Great literary minds are, almost by definition, great mind-reading minds. Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim. We are clever because we are - and to the extent that we are - natural psychologists.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she's pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and fertility. Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore, everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women and every person inherits from those ancestors that same preference.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Because bodies do not replicate themselves, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

If we were chimpanzees we would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial and aggressive towards groups other than those we belonged to. In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist and belligerent, which we are.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock's tail - an ornament designed for sexual display, whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side-effect of the ability to charm.
I end with one of the strangest consequences of sex -that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expression for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness and individuality turn other people on.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

S

There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.
Sowell, Thomas
The Vision of the Anointed

Widespread personification of 'society' is another verbal tactic that evades issues of personal responsibility. Such use of the term 'society' is a more sophisticated version of the notion that 'the devil made me do it.' Like much of the rest of the special vocabulary of the anointed, it is used as a magic word to make choice, behavior, and performance vanish into thin air.
Sowell, Thomas
The Vision of the Anointed

Given the torrential emotional outlay contests inspire on a daily basis, it’s amazing that human beings find time even to govern themselves. And yet—what is at the heart of every democracy but yet another contest—elections. We’ve even adopted the lingo of sports to describe our politics—the campaign is a “race”; and debates are scored like boxing matches. Constant polls amount to a sort of real-time scoreboard; election day is the buzzer. Perhaps this is the secret enduring quality of democracy: whichever way the ideological winds may be blowing, the public is always hungry for a good race. Even our judicial system is powered by contests—what is a trial but an intellectual sporting match? Everywhere you look, it seems, humans are compulsively gathering around to watch two sides battle it out. In this context, it was hard to see the couple aboard the Crimson Express as doing anything but steadfastly pursuing a universal human urge, third perhaps only to hunger and sex in its power over humankind.
St. John, Warren
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer

No one ever said it would be simple.
And so, on we go, blindly – as so many people do, always, in their own time – through the age of terror.
Suskind, Ron
The One Percent Doctrine

T

"But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling though a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones that have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later."
Thompson, Hunter S.
Hell's Angels

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
Thompson, Hunter S.
Fear and Loathing Las Vegas

My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I often drank there, but I was never accepted because I wore a tie. The real people wanted no part of me.
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

"At the time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

"Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got a hold of, and never would. It was a maddening image, and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum. Often it was easier not to wait, so the drinking would begin at noon. It didn't help much, as I recall, except that sometimes it made the day go a little faster."
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

"Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception --especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

They [psychiatrists] would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!... The only problem that those people [psychiatric patients] have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions."

"Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked."

"Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that Dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr. Becnel one of the martyrs of our age. The poor man was badly victimized."
Toole, John Kennedy
A Confederacy of Dunces

"Perhaps I likened myself to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness when, far from the trading company offices in Europe, he was faced with the ultimate horror. I do remember imagining myself in a pith helmet and white linen jodhpurs, my face enigmatic behind of a veil of mosquito netting."
Toole, John Kennedy
A Confederacy of Dunces

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

Being unconquerable lies with yourself; being conquerable lies with your enemy.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

W

In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the heads of the people. As idealistic as that sounded, he followed with the even more practical advice that even though the Mongol Empire should be one, the subject people should never be allowed to unite as one. "People conquered on different sides of the lake should be ruled on different sides of the lake"
Weatherford, Jack
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

"... somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow ... you've got to have some faith in what you're trying to do. It's easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you've got to have faith in us all the way..."
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

"... We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened atleast 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't."
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

A bold thinker, Mattis’s favorite expression is “Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative”. On the battlefield, his call sign is “Chaos”. His plans for the Marines in Iraq would hinge on disregarding sacred tenets of American military doctrine. His goal was not to shield his Marines from chaos, but to embrace it.
Wright, Evan
Generation Kill

X

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books."
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eyes so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Y

"Was, then, oil power an illusion, or was it a product of a particular constellation of economic, political, and ideological circumstances? Was it a one-time phenomenon, or will it prove to be a recurring fixture of international life? Control of, or at least access to, large sources of oil has long constituted a strategic prize.
Of that there can be no doubt. It enables nations to accumulate wealth, to fuel their economies, to produce and sell goods and services, to build, to buy, to move, to acquire and manufacture weapons, to win wars. Yet it is also a prize that can be overvalued. Moreover, the very reality of a world based on oil is coming to be questioned."
Yergin, Daniel
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power