"Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue." - Washington Irving

"When you become frustrated with older people because of what they cannot do, think of how frustrated they must feel because they can no longer do it. It's easy to feel a surge of frustration when an older loved one struggles with tasks that once seemed simple for them. Watching them grapple with technology, forgetful moments, or physical limitations can test our patience. However, in these moments, it's essential to remember that our frustration is but a shadow of what they must be experiencing internally. In the grand tapestry of life, the roles we play often shift. Today, we may be the ones offering support; tomorrow, we might find ourselves in need of it. By approaching our older loved ones with empathy, we honor their journey and enrich our own, creating a legacy of compassion that transcends generations." - unknown

"A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad." - Gregory of Tours (539-594)

"When it comes to arrogance, power, and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good." - Steven Brill

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want." - Hannah Arendt

Abraham Lincoln once asked General Winfield Scott this question: "Why is it that you were once able to take Mexico City in three months with five thousand men, and we have been unable to take Richmond with one hundred thousand men?" "I will tell you," said General Scott. "The men who took us into Mexico City are the same men who are keeping us out of Richmond." Confederate Veteran Magazine, September 1913, page 471.

"I made a very important discovery at Camp Currie. Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you've ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don't need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he's as happy as a worm in an apple — asleep." - Robert A. Heinlein, in Starship Troopers

"I told you that 'juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms. `Delinquent' means 'failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue - indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be, a 'juvenile delinquent.' But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents — people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail." - Robert A. Heinlein, in Starship Troopers

"And thus concludes another of those trips which we shall long remember. Trips on which one is given to study, thought, meditation, in which one is humbled by the realization that great men have lived and died, great civilizations have flourished and perished, and back of all the Great Creator carries on with a plan so vast that these periods which are ages to us are to Him but passing moments. "We come back after standing before the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Da Vinci, and instinctively ask ourselves, "If these men created things that were to live longer than themselves, what shall we say of man, the finest work of God, does he live after death or is God's work temporary and unenduring? Unless the soul of man is immortal, unless he lives after death, then man is a greater creator than the God who made him. Our experience seems to say in all instances, 'The Creator is greater than the created.' In the presence of these ruins someone whispered, 'O, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?'" - Hugh B. Brown, after travel abroad

"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible." - George Orwell

"When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say." - Tyrion Lannister

"All skill is in vain when an angel pees in the touch hole of your musket." - German proverb.

"Life is just like an old-time rail journey ... delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride." - Jenkin Lloyd Jones.

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you." - Will Rogers

"The horror of Communism is not that bad people do bad things; its that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great" - Slavoj Žižek

“The influence of art is so powerful in shaping our lives for a higher appreciation of the creations of our God that we cannot afford to neglect an acquaintance with it. We should be eager for its companionship as we are eager for food to sustain our lives, for it has as important a mission in shaping our character and in conducting to our happiness as anything that we term necessities. Life is incomplete without it.” - John Hafen

"If you turned the electricity off for a few months in any developed Western society 500 years of supposed philosophical progress about human rights and individualism would quickly evaporate like they never happened." - Murtaza Hussain

"God has blessed me with a cheerful heart, and He will forgive me for serving him cheerfully." - Franz Joseph Haydn

“At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.” - P.J. O'Rourke

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right." - George Orwell

"He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms. One of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom a more even than on the thought police, the stability of the party depended." - George Orwell from 1984. (Describe anyone you know?)

"The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything." - Gilbert K. Chesterton

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.” - Milton Friedman

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - 1984, George Orwell

“I don’t like to mix politics and rock ‘n’ roll. When musicians are telling people who to vote for, I think that’s an abuse of power. You’re telling your fans not to think for themselves, just to think like you. Rock ‘n’ roll is about freedom — and that’s not freedom.” - Alice Cooper

"Men do not learn from history. Each generation believes itself brighter than the last, each believes it can survive the mistakes of the older ones. Each discovers each old thing and they throw up their hands and say 'See! Look what I have found! Look upon what I know!' And each believes it is something new." - a character in Californios, a novel by Louis L'Amour

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” - Abraham Lincoln

I remember a little girl...
But how can that be?
Once I was that little Resi,
and then one day I became an old woman.
...If God wills it so, why allow me to see it?
Why doesn't he hide it from me?
Everything is a mystery, such a deep mystery...
I feel the fragility of things in time.
From the bottom of my heart, I feel we should
cling to nothing.
Everything slips through our fingers.
All that we seek to hold on to dissolves.
Everything vanishes, like mist and dreams...
Time is a strange thing.
When we don't need it, it is nothing.
Then, suddenly, there is nothing else.
It is everywhere around us. Also within us.
It seeps into our faces.
It seeps into the mirror, runs through my temples
Between you and I it runs silently, like an hourglass.
Oh, Quin Quin.
Sometimes I feel it flowing inexorably.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night
and stop all the clocks...

The Marschallin in Richard Strauss' opera Der Rosenkavalier

"This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief." - Rumi

"However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing." - George Orwell

"Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges." - George Orwell

"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing." - George Orwell

"The fact is, and I have noticed it so often that that I do not know why it should always surprise me, that the extraordinariness of a man's life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate." - W. Somerset Maugham

"I used to think Donald Trump was inarticulate. But Joe Biden makes him sound like Winston Churchill." - an unnamed friend

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Menken

Prophecy fulfilled. That happened when Biden took office.

"The prospect of fighting is agreeable only to those who are strangers to it." - Vegitius, a Roman military writer, 400 AD

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, then I do not know." - Saint Augustine

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” - Edward Bernays

"If we open a quarrel between the past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future." - Winston Churchill

"The battle, with all its melancholy results, proved, however, that the Confederate infantry and Federal artillery, side by side on the same field, need fear no foe on earth." - Confederate General D.H. Hill (writing about the Battle of Malvern Hill)

"It's a strange phenomenon that as soon as you become prominent in any field, whether you are an actor, a politician, a businessman or a gangster, your opinion is sought on every conceivable subject. What is still stranger is that you give it!" - Commander Edward Whitehead

"The way I show I am not a mindless party voter is to vote Republican while I am alive as I will surely be voting Democrat when I am dead." - Mal Stylo (a Maryland resident)

“He who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire

“We didn't love freedom enough." - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

"History is too important a subject to trust to historians. They have too many axes to grind, hobby horses to ride, theories to tout, tenure to win, colleagues to impress or disparage. Too often, the facts of the history are hijacked to hammer around those models. Purely objective history, though, is an ideal, and probably beyond human authorship." - David McCullough

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." - Misattributed to Voltaire, it's actually by Kevin Alfred Strom, a white supremacist.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis

"Don't try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other." - Al Bundy

"If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them then someday you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them." - Sign seen at a Jimmy John's sandwich shop

"This [deposing Maduro] is taking longer than they thought despite the sanctions, despite the pressure ... Maduro is hanging on. Not only hanging on but he appears to still control the military. You have to understand that in Venezuela, gun ownership is not something that is open to everybody, so if the military have the guns, they have the power. And as long as Nicolas Maduro controls the military, he controls the country." - MSNBC news correspondent Kerry Sanders regarding the violent 2019 protests in Venezuela, inadvertently making the case for gun rights. He'll probably get fired by MSNBC.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

"He who learns his history is doomed to suffer at the hands of idiots who did not learn it and those who willfully disregard it for their own short-term purposes." - Luben Montoya

"Comparison is the thief of joy." - Teddy Roosevelt

A funny quote I found at the beginning of a scholarly book about rugby:

"Why do your young men behave like this, Solon? Some of them grappling and tripping each other, some throttling, struggling, intertwining in the mud like so many pigs wallowing... they put down their heads and begin to push, and crash their foreheads together like a pair of rival rams... Now I want to know what is the good of it all. To me it looks more like madness than anything else... I'm still more astonished at the spectators. You tell me the chief people from all over Greece attend. How can they leave their serious concerns and waste time on such things? How they can like it passes my comprehension - to look on people being struck and knocked about, dashed to the ground and pounded by one another." - Lucian of Samosata, Anacharsis: On Physical Exercise (2nd C. A.D.)

“The job of the artist is to make the audience care about your obsessions.” - Martin Scorsese

"There are notions so foolish that only an intellectual will believe them." - George Orwell

“Il n’y a que la verite qui blesse.” ("It is only the truth that hurts.") - French saying

“The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion, and this sweeping power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk about and think about – an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.” - Theodore White

"It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies... The fathers would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable." - Ulysses S. Grant (So - would he be advocating the repeal of the Second Amendment were he alive today?)

"Hollywood really knows how to blow things up, whether it be bombs doing it to battleships or a script accomplishing the same thing to historical fact." - Lawrence Reed

"But who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?" - Winston Churchill (following a humorous anecdote described in his history of World War II)

"We do not war with races primarily as such. Tyranny is our foe. Whatever trapping or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must for ever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In all this we march together. Not only do we march and strive shoulder to shoulder at this moment, under the fire of the enemy on the fields of war or in the air, but also in those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and the dignity of man." - Winston Churchill

"History is the most powerful ingredient in any dish." - Unknown (I saw it on a shopping bag one day)

"Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship." — Harry S Truman

"Heroes come and go, but idiots are forever." - Bulk and Skull of the Power Rangers

“Someone who knows how to play the accordion …but doesn’t.” - Al Cohn’s definition of a gentleman

“To be a musician is a curse. To not be one is even worse. - Jack Daney

“Don’t bother to look; I’ve composed all this already.” - Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria

“[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art.” - Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

“I am not handsome but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet.” - Niccoló Paganini

“You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and go slow.”- Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

“God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.” - Arturo Toscanini, to a trumpet player

“Never look at the trombones; it only encourages them.” - Richard Strauss

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol

"For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863." - William Faulkner in "Intruder in the Dust"

“In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey orders!” - First Sea Lord Admiral Sir “Jackie” Fisher

"The Creator has not thought proper to mark those on the forehead who are of the stuff to make good generals. We learn first, therefore, to seek them, blindfolded, and then let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses." - Thomas Jefferson

“The last and ultimate human freedom is the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.” - Victor Frankl, Holocaust survivor

"History shall be kind to me, for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill

"A writer who says there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. SO DON'T." - Roger Scruton

"Without trade there’s no wealth, and without wealth there’s no society worth having. Without trade, Private Sharpe, we’d be nothing but beasts in the mud. Trade is indeed worth fighting for, though the good Lord knows we don’t appreciate trade much. We celebrate kings, we honor great men, we admire aristocrats, we applaud actors, we shower gold on portrait painters and we even, sometimes, reward soldiers, but we always despise merchants. But why? It’s the merchant’s wealth that drives the mills, Sharpe; it moves the looms, it keeps the hammers falling, it fills the fleets, it makes the roads, it forges the iron, it grows the wheat, it bakes the bread, and it builds the churches and the cottages and the palaces. Without God and trade we would be nothing.” - From "Sharpe's Tiger" by Bernard Cornwell

"Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five-to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply)." - Barbara Tuchman

"Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction." - Richard Matheson

"Don't mistake my kindness for weakness. I am kind to everyone, but when someone is unkind to me, weak is not what you are going to remember about me." - Al Capone

"The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity." - Ulysses S. Grant

"The worst thing about growing old is that younger men no longer regard you as dangerous." - Unknown

"When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction." - Stephen King

"Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation." - John Le Carre (about George Smiley)

"You don't fight to protect warships or old men. Like the book says, you fight to save your civilization. And so often it seems that civilization is composed mainly of the things women and children want." - James Michener (in "The Bridges of Toko-Ri")

"Part of the joy of finding a hobby you're passionate about is over-thinking it." - "Uvalde" (on a perfume forum site)

"If blood lust is a product of actual combat then the reenacting version is probably acid reflux." - Mal Stylo

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." - C.S. Lewis

"Most all arguments, troubles and problems are fought from one side of a skull to the other. The six inch war fought in six inch battles: between the ears." - Barry Burnett

"The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business."--C.S. Lewis

"I cannot speak so confidently about the fighting qualities of the Eastern men, or what are called Yankees - not knowing myself particularly to whom the appellation belongs - but this I do know - if the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake."- Abraham Lincoln, Feb. 17, 1862

"It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent." --Sir Herbert Butterfield, 'The Whig Interpretation of History'

"Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before." - Michael Sims

"There are actually people who go out and re-fight these battles. You know what I say? Use real ammunition! You just might raise the intelligence level of the American gene pool!" - George Carlin

"The Internet is for lonely people." - Charlton Heston

"Polynikes turned again to Alexandros. When he resumed now, his voice was gentle and without malice; if anything it seemed informed with something not unlike kindness and even, odd as it sounds, sorrow. 'Mankind as it is constituted,' Polynikes said, 'is a boil and a canker. Observe the specimens in any nation other than Lakedaemon. Man is weak, greedy, craven, lustful, prey to every species of vice and depravity. He will lie, steal, cheat, murder, melt down the very statues of the gods and coin their gold as money for whores. This is man. This is his nature, as all the poets attest. Fortunately God in his mercy has provided a counterpoise to our species' innate depravity. That gift, my young friend, is war. War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable in a man. It unites him with his brothers and binds them in selfless love, eradicating in the crucible of necessity all which is base and ignoble. There in the holy mill of murder the meanest of men may seek and find that part of himself, concealed beneath the corrupt, which shines forth brilliant and virtuous, worthy of honor before the gods. Do not despise war, my young friend, nor delude yourself that mercy and compassion are virtues superior to andreia, to manly valor.' He finished, turning to Medon and the elders. 'Forgive me for waxing long~winded.'" - From "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield (a novel about Spartans and the battle of Thermopylae)

"In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains." - Dwight Eisenhower

"You may be obliged to wage war, but not to use poisoned arrows." - Baltasar Gracian

"We have good corporals and good sergeants and some good lieutenants and captains, and those are far more important than good generals." - William Tecumseh Sherman

"Dulce bellum inexpertis." ("War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.") - Erasmus

"Those who do not do battle for their country do not know with what ease they accept their citizenship in America." - Dean Brelis

"We need to take nostalgia seriously as an energizing impulse, maybe even a form of knowledge. The effort to revalue what has been lost can motivate serious historical inquiry; it can also cast a powerful light on the present." - Jackson Lears

"Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore their music, even if restored with utter technical perfections, can never have to us precisely the same meaning it had for them. We cannot tear down the barricade that separates the present world from things and deeds past." - Paul Hindemith (This is about music, but I think the application of this quote to reenacting is obvious.)

"The really historical performance would talk to ghosts." - Nietzsche

"The art of victory is learned in defeat." - Simon Bolivar

"If you have no courage you must have fast legs." - Anon.

"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

"There could not possibly be 71 virgins awaiting them in heaven because as our hymn says, 'The streets are guarded by United States Marines!'" - U.S. Marine, Iraq

"When you men get home and face an anti-war protester, look him in the eyes and shake his hand. Then, wink at his girlfriend, because she knows she's dating a pussy." - Attributed to General Tommy Franks

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf" - George Orwell

"In this business, you find the enemy, then go after and destroy him. Everything else is rubbish!" - Eddie Rickenbacker

"The Spartans do not enquire how many the enemy are, but where they are." - Agis II, 427 B.C.

"I like Marines because being a Marine is serious business. We're not a social club or a fraternal organization and we don't pretend to be one. We're a brotherhood of warriors - nothing more, nothing less, pure and simple. We are in the ass-kicking business, and unfortunately, these days business is good." - Col. James M. Lowe, Commander, MCB Quantico, 2004

"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman Legions did - by putting your soldiers in the mud." - T.R. Fehrenbach, "This Kind of War"

"No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb unless the lamb is inside." - D.H. Lawrence

"This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games." - William S. Burroughs

"Here lies a Hampshire Grenadier/Who caught his death/Drinking cold small beer./A good soldier/Is ne'er forgot/Whether he dieth by musket/Or by pot." - Tombstone inscription found at Winchester Cathedral in England. ("Pot" is liquor and not cannabis.)

"I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation." - Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Everyone has a plan until he gets hit." - Mike Tyson

"Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again." - Jack Handey ("Deep Thoughts")

"...he probably doesn't mind suiting up, for the appeal of anachronistic costume is strong enough to make time-transvestism one of his most notorious secret vices." - Richard E. Crouch, in The Virginia Gentleman - A Field Guide, an Owner's Manual, a History and a Way of Life. (Crouch is speaking of hunting clothing, not a Reb uniform, but I liked the phrase "time-transvestism.")

"War is an initiation into the power of life and death. Women touch that power on the moment of birth, men at the edge of death." - William Broyles

"War is to man what motherhood is to women." - Benito Mussolini

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

"We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible." - George Santayana

"It is an interesting question how far people would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes." - Henry David Thoreau

"The new officer had early achieved a part of his ambition - to be called a brave man by established brave men." - Stephen Crane ("The Clan of No-Name")

Writing about Plymouth Rock: "This rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does this sufficiently show how all human power and greatness are entirely in the soul? Here is a stone which the feet of a few poor fugitives pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, a fragment is prized as a relic. But what has become of the doorsteps of a thousand palaces? Who troubles himself about them?" - Alexis de Tocqueville

"There are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune." - Alexis de Tocqueville

"The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency." - George Orwell

"Diversity is okay but homogeneity is undervalued." - Jonah Begone

"An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." - George Orwell

"Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier." - Samuel Johnson

"Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they have ever made a difference in the world, but the Marines don't have that problem." - Ronald Reagan

"The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!" - Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945

"A ship without Marines is like a garment without buttons!" - Admiral David Porter

"Marines are about the most peculiar breed of human beings I have ever witnessed. They treat their service as if it were some kind of cult, plastering their emblem on almost everything they own, making themselves up to look like insane fanatics with haircuts ungentlemanly short, worshipping their Commandant almost as if he were a god, and making weird animal noises like a band of savages. They will fight like rabid dogs at the drop of a hat just for the sake of a little action and are the cockiest SOB's I have ever known. Most have the foulest mouths and drink well beyond a man's normal limits. But, their high spirits and sense of brotherhood set them apart and, generally speaking, the United States Marines I have come in contact with are the most professional soldiers and the finest men I have had the pleasure to meet." - Anonymous Canadian Citizen, 1969

"I want to fall on the floor laughing - imagining Hillary Clinton working well in the Senate with everybody else! Oh, give me a break. I've already joked in print that they would need to build her a private cloakroom on the Mall. This is not a woman who has any ability to deal with the mass of humanity. She is the most arrogant, the most moralistic, the most sermonizing and annoying person on earth...." - Camille Paglia

"Massive ego and narcissism may be the primary ingredients for achieving and maintaining Hollywood success, but they are also the No. 1 cause of the grandiose foibles in their storied, disastrous personal lives. The full-time job of parenting requires absolute selflessness. In contrast, the full-time job of celebrity requires absolute selfishness. The two by definition do not naturally co-exist. Yet, because of their fame, money, and social power, stars somehow think they can defy the odds and maintain a high level of professional success, and still raise healthy families in the process. No wonder so much rotten fruit is hanging from the dysfunctional celebrity family tree." - Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner

"The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted." - James Madison

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." - Bertrand Russell

"Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks." - Doug Larson

"In war, as in prostitution, amateurs are often better than professionals." - Napoleon

"History does not repeat itself, but sometimes it does rhyme." - Mark Twain

"History never repeats itself; historians repeat each other." - Oscar Wilde

"Time is measured by the quality and not the quanity of sensations it contains." - Algernon Blackwood

"The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle." - James Michener, in Tales of the South Pacific

"No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace: in peace children bury their fathers, while in war fathers bury their children." - Herodotus

"There is in life only one moment and in eternity only one. It is so brief that it is represented by the fleeting of a luminous mote through the thin ray of sunlight - and it is visible but a fraction of a second. The moments that preceded it have been lived, are forgotten and are without value; the moments that have not been lived have no existence and will have no value except in the moment that each shall be lived. While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same." - Mark Twain

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." - George Orwell (about interpreting history)

"We're three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France and Spain, roll them all together and it won't give us room to park our cars. We're the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time." - P.J. O'Rourke (about America)

"I suffered privations of heat and cold in far off lands such as Virginia and Quebec, Maine and Georgia; drank tepid canteen water; ate strange food cooked in iron kettles and carried in dirty haversacks; went tentless, was rained on and slept on frozen ground; felt the blasts of bulletless muskets and heard loud noisy cannon blasts; was hollered at and demeaned by officers with no real rank; marched into battle with people who were unauthentically dressed or equipped; treated rudely by British soldier re-enactors; cursed heartily by wild-eyed Confederate re-enactors; intermingled with secret Neo-Nazis dressed in German WW2 uniforms; listened to ribald ballads sung by drunks. I reenacted wars to make the world free to re-enact other wars." - Bob Fleming

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." - Frederick Douglass

"God has left this tincture in the blood/That all men would be tyrants if they could." - Daniel Defoe

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill

"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us." - Leo Tolstoy

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force." - George Washington

"History: an account mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." - Ambrose Bierce

"What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson

"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." - Oscar Wilde

"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite." - Winston Churchill (on the occasion of his government declaring war on Japan)

"Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them." - John Fowles

"The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving." - Ulysses S. Grant

"The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky." - Solomon Short

"With the possible exception of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture celebrating Napoleon's defeat at the gates of Moscow, name one song closely identified with the War of 1812. If you are a baby boomer - or the offspring of one who ever endured a road trip with your parents - likely you know the answer. Almost a century and a half after the historic event, country-and-western singer Johnny Horton set folks to tapping their toes to the strains of his account of the Battle of New Orleans. "In eighteen-fourteen we took a little trip," sang Johnny, "along with Colonel Jackson down the Mighty Mississipp'/we took a little bacon and we took a little beans/and we caught the bloody British near the town of New Orleans." - Walter R. Borneman, from "1812 - The War that Forged a Nation"

"After I'm dead, I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one." - Cato the Elder

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte

"Weasel words from mollycoddles will never do when the day demands prophetic clarity from greathearts. Manly men must emerge for this hour of trial." - Teddy Roosevelt

"We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic." - John Stossel, "Give Me a Break!"

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." - Wilhelm Stekel

"Somehow it is the male's duty to put the best years of his life into work he doesn't like in order that he may "retire" and enjoy himself as soon as he is too old to do so. This is more than just the system - it is the credo. It is the same thing that prompted Thoreau to say, in 1839: 'The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'" - Sterling Hayden

"You are a cruel man... but go now and exert all your frightfulness, and I shall not even blame you, but praise you." King Edward I, 1298, to John FitzMarmaduke.

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." - Samuel Johnson

"There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transcience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal diety was fate or destiny or "wyrd." - Peter Ackroyd, in "Albion - The Origins of the English Imagination." (I would argue that many reenactors take part in dustsceawung. - Jonah)

"The main thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history." - Winston Churchill

"He who would foresee what is to happen should look to what has happened: for all that is has its counterpart in time past." - Machiavelli

"I have always had the feeling that on the Day of Judgment, when all things shall be known, when I and the other generations of 'Ripperologists' ask for Jack the Ripper to step forward and call out his true name, we shall turn and look with blank astonishment at one another as he does so and say 'Who?'" - Donald Rumbalow, "Jack the Ripper - the Complete Casebook"

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." - L.P. Hartley

"You cannot reason people out of something to which reason hasn't brought them." - Jonathan Swift (about politics)

"No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain." - Joseph Epstein

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." - Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

"I believe he (President George W. Bush) thinks this is a war that can be won, but there is no such thing anymore." - George Clooney

"America has never paid any attention to other people, so it's absurd for Bush to say that it's all in the best interests of the Iraqi people. If the United States marches into Iraq without the backing of the United Nations, that will be done entirely without the backing of the American people." - Richard Gere

(I know there are countless other examples of Hollywood types making asses out of themselves, but these two suffice as liberal commentary - or commentary on liberals - on the 2003 Iraq War.)

In light of the quotes above, this one seems especially apt:

"Can a nation remain healthy, can all nations draw together in a world whose brightest stars are film stars?" - Winston Churchill

"It is not that God should be on our side, but that we be on His." - Attributed to various U.S. presidents

"Every man deserves to be judged in the context of his times." - George Bernard Shaw

"The French couldn't hate us any more unless we helped 'em out in another war." - Will Rogers

"War Never Solved Anything... except Slavery, Communism and Fascism" - A bumper sticker

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." - Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

"The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South." - Roy Blount Jr.

"At any street corner, the absurd may strike a man in the face." - Albert Camus

(Were this to be worded, "At any reenactment company street corner," it would be doubly true. - Jonah)

"Much more deeply significant are the boredom with the unutterably dull peace-time occupations of most people, and the childish but universal delight men take in playing soldiers. Until they actually suffered from dirt, lousiness, fatigue, terror, disease, or wounds, most men enjoyed the last war. [WWI - Jonah.] Think of the man who has lived meagerly in a frame house on the outskirts of Somerville or Weehawken, and for ten years - except for two weeks in August - has regularly caught the eight-fifteen, spent the rest of the day floorwalking, and then caught the six-twenty back to what he came from in the morning! Think of his feelings of release and self-satisfaction when he is marching up Broadway behind the band, between files of cheering garment workers. Think of his pride in a renewed manhood, standing guard at dawn or lying behind a pile of sandbags pot-shooting his fellow man, or drinking beer, with his comrades - knowing that the world approves him as a hero, and that his family has the government to look out for it forever and ever!

But beyond the release from boredom there is the joy in uniforms which stimulates war. The instinct for fancy dress is hard to kill, as anybody knows who has been in a town where the Mystic Knights or the Shriners or the Red Indians were holding a convention; or even in Boston, when the Ancient and Honorables are blocking traffic on Beacon Hill. And, further, there is the applause of the women, - not women in general, but each man's own women, - who, as instinctively as the men like to play soldiers, have the hereditary longing to glorify the brave brutalities that their heroes write home about: "I threw a hand grenade into a dugout, and blew up six Germans. I'm going to be kissed by the general." "Isn't he wonderful? Just a big, brave boy!" - Hans Zinsser, in his book "Rats, Lice and History - A Chronicle of Pestilence and Plagues."

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides end hurricanes he will encounter. The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance!" - Winston Churchill

Pretty Young Gal in Shorts: "Are you hot in all that wool?" Member of 14th Tennessee: "Some women think so."

"Movies are like writing history with lightning."- Woodrow Wilson

"When I joined the military it was illegal to be homosexual, then it became optional. I'm getting out before it becomes mandatory."- General J. Wickam, U S Army, Retired

If I was a Jewish girl in Hitler's day, I would become his girlfriend. After ten days in bed, he would come to my way of thinking.

- Yoko Ono, on how she would have prevented the Holocaust

The body of a dead enemy always smells good.

- Charles IX of France

"The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet." - Edward Thomas

"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter."

- Winston Churchill

"I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering and that was the fact that it is past and can't be restored."

- Mark Twain

"We train hard...but every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life we would meet any new situation by reorganizing...and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency and demoralization."

- Petronius 66 A.D.

"It's all fun and games until somebody puts out an eye."

- Mom

"War does not determine who is right; war determines who is left." - Unknown

"Every man over 40 has the face he deserves."

- George Orwell

"Only the soldier is a free man, because he can look death in the face."

- Friedrich Schiller

"A clown is funny in the circus ring, but what would be the normal reaction to opening a door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there in the moonlight?

- Lon Chaney Sr.

"Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins."

- Mafia informant Sammy "the Bull" Gravano

"It is a curious fact that no Germanic nation in early historic times had a word properly meaning 'war.'"

- The Oxford English Dictionary

"The words 'Here you can find perfect peace' can be written only over the gates of a cemetery."

- Leibnitz

"Only the dead have seen an end to war."

- Plato

"Three-quarters of a soldier's life is spent in aimlessly waiting about."

- Rosenstock-Hussy

"I hate war: it ruins conversation."

- Bertrand de Bovier de Fontenelle

"A bad peace is even worse than war."

- Tacitus

"There never was a good war or a bad peace."

- Benjamin Franklin

"An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war."

- Mark Twain

"War is the father of everything."

- Heraclitus

"Being a Daddy is priority number one. When you are old and facing oblivion in a nursing home or a hospital or on a golf course in winter, you are not going to wish you had spent more time at the office or making a sales call or watching a show. You will wish you had spent more time with your family."

- Ben Stein

"All battles are won before they are fought."

- Sun Tzu

"There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about."

- Mark Twain (speaking as Tom Sawyer)

"The most original genius is the most indebted man."

Unknown

"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.''

- Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in "The Third Man"

"War springs from the nobly born; famous pedigrees are the makers of war. For the perilous deeds which chiefs attempt are not to be done by the ventures of common men... No dim and lowly race, no low-born dead, no base souls are Pluto's prey, but he weaves the dooms of the mighty, and fills Phlegethon with noble shapes.

- Saxo Grammaticus, 1215 A.D.

(Which sounds like the medieval version of the Civil War saying "It's a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," or even later allusions to the "best and brightest" who conducted the war in Vietnam.)

"There is nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot at without effect."

- Winston Churchill

"The stupidity of a stupid man is exercised in a restricted field; the stupidity of an intelligent man has a much wider diffusion, and a far greater effect, aided as it is by the element of surprise."

- Peter Ustinov

"When soldiers deal with one another, all goes well. But as soon as the diplomats step in the result is unadulterated stupidity."

- Czar Alexander II

"Generals cannot be trusted with anything, not even with war."

- Georges Clemenceau

"Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present."

- Paul Fussell

"A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."

- Joseph Stalin

"Let he who laughs last, laugh best."

- Old proverb

"To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman." - George Santayana

"Women encourage killers. They do it by falling in love with warriors and heroes. Men know it and respond with enthusiasm. The Crusaders marched off to war with ladies favors in their helmets. The heroes sliced up adults and baked infants on spits, all the while thinking of how the damsels back home would admire their bravery."

- Howard Bloom

"History is bunk."

- Henry Ford

"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." - George Santayana

"The object of war is to make the other poor bastard die for what he believes in."

- General George Patton

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

- Groucho Marx

"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee."

- Lester J. Pourciau

"Don't pay any attention to what the critics say. No statue has ever been erected over a critic."

- Jean Sibelius

"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

--John Stuart Mill

"I would think that if you understood what sex education is, you would get down on your knees and worship a condom."

- Jane Fonda

"People who think like us may be in the minority, but we're the smart ones. ... [The Ten Commandments] are a little out of date. If you're only going to have ten rules, I don't know if [prohibiting] adultery should be one of them."

- Ted Turner

(Yes, I realize these aren't at quite the same timeless level as the others, but sometimes a quote brilliantly describes not only the speaker, but an entire mindset shared by many people. These are husband and wife examples; while I can't understand why someone would want to marry Jane Fonda I can certainly understand why her husband would be promoting adultery. )

"The Almighty has no attribute that can take sides with the slaveholder."

From an abolition banner

"Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive."

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"It's futile to talk too much about the past. It's like trying to make birth control retroactive."

- Charles E. Wilson

"The next person who mentions Davy Crockett to me gets a Davy Crockett flintlock over his head."

- A department store buyer in the 50's

"Do nothing and hope the enemy fades away."

- Fabius Maximus (Roman commander who outlasted Hannibal in Italy)

"Lay low and say nuffin'."

- Br'er Rabbit

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question."

- George Orwell

"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography."

-Paul Rodriguez

"To my mind to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder."

- Albert Einstein

"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."

-- Dante, The Inferno (I hope Swiss watches are adjusted for warm temperatures.)

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

- Albert Einstein

"After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box."

- Italian Proverb

"Du sublime au ridicule, il n'y a qu'un pas." ("From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.")

-- Napoleon I

"To Penrod, school was merely a state of confinement, envenomed by mathematics. For interminable periods he was forced to listen to information concerning matters about which he had no curosity whatever; and he had to read over and over the dullest passages in books that bored him into stupors, while always there overhung the preposterous task of improvising plausible evasions to conceal the fact that he did not know what he had no wish to know. Likewise, he must always be prepared to avoid incriminating replies to questions that he felt nobody had a real and natural right to ask him."

"One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act."

"The only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her - especially if that is what she desires."

"This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime -- he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable."

- Booth Tarkington, in his book "Penrod"

Boys and Girls,
And Women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war,
The best amusement of our evening's meal;
As if the soldier died without a wound;
As if the fibres of this godlike frame
Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch,
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,
Passed off to heaven, translated and not killed...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge