“The time for miracles has either passed or has not yet come, and besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means distorting logic and the very nature of things in order to prove them.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
Category: History
“Conflicts between fathers and sons, the inheritance of guilt, the disavowal of kith and kin, the sacrifice of innocents, go back a long way in time and promise to be endless.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Ninth Air Force – A XIX Tactical Air Command squadron uniquely effects surrender of a number of German ground troops. Germans on roads being strafed by the squadron northeast of Carrouges, France, wave white flags, whereupon planes buzz the road and shepherd enemy troops into a column which then proceeds to US lines to surrender.” – Kit C. Carter and Robert Mueller, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II Combat Chronology, 1941 – 1945
“As much as people love to use the Founding Fathers as a reason why the youths these days can’t wear lipstick and listen to horny pop music, everything we know about history leads us to the expectation that Benjamin Franklin would probably actually fucking love it here today.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route
“The Confederacy was not just a separatist movement, it was an existential threat to the very idea of freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—it could not be abided, and that conflict left so many dead that the streets of Gettysburg were once littered with so many corpses that it was weeks getting them into the mass graves. The town was covered in the rotting dead and the stench of them, all lying underneath the Pennsylvania sun. . . . a town where, once the armies moved on to fight again elsewhere, there weren’t enough people left alive to wash the blood from the streets and the gore from the walls—that’s what civil war means.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route (emphasis in original)
“Foreign policy isn’t fair. It’s not fair for politicians, either.” – Justin King, “The Roads Not Taken, Ep 38,” Beau of the Fifth Column, May 12, 2024
“The government’s greatest power to change the landscape isn’t with bulldozing or bombs, it’s the ability to transform nature into squares, with a simple stroke of the pen.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route
“The problem with history is that it’s full of incredible jokes that take too damn long to set up.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route
“1 B-17, upon an alleged submarine sighting, drops 4 depth charges and 1 bomb whereupon a whale breaks water. Weather cancels other missions.” – Eleventh Air Force Operations, January 30, 1943, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, Combat Chronology (compiled by Kit C. Carter & Robert Mueller)
“Early and medieval Christians assumed female hysterics were possessed by the devil and utilized a combination of prayer, exorcism, and torture to cure them. Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, scholars and physicians more benignly concluded that hysteria was a mental disease, properly ameliorated by regular marital sex, frequent pregnancy, childbirth, daily orgasms, and the occasional rest cure. By the early twentieth century, female hysteria encompassed a burgeoning range of symptoms, including compulsive speech or muteness, inappropriate movement or paralysis, deafness, hallucinations, anxiety, insomnia, fainting, amnesia. Severely affected patients were hospitalized or institutionalized, treated with hypnosis, physical restraints, and pelvic massage to induce climax.” – Anne Kenner, “Saying It”
“To work for crumbs or to keep from the lash says maybe a slave’s what you are.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“Change ain’t lookin’ for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“No nation is rich enough or productive enough to supply and maintain battlefronts where there is no longer a battle.” – War Department “Reports on Overseas Construction” (quoted by Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943)
“During the first nineteen months of its participation in World War II, the U.S. Army purchased almost 950,000 trucks, nineteen times the number it had procured during the corresponding period of World War I. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day it procured for its own and Allied forces some 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, 350,000 artillery pieces, .5 billion rounds of ground artillery ammunition, 41 billion rounds of small arms ammunition. It shipped overseas 127 million measurement tons of cargo, and 7.3 million troops and other passengers.” – Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943
“It is better and cheaper to have a strong Army and not need it than it is to need a strong Army and not have it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“Any politician should be put in jail who votes for an appropriation bill and fails to vote the tax to pay for it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“I can see it in a vision. It comes to haunt me at night. I am standing there knee deep in the water and all around me as far as the eye can see are dead men, floating like a school of dynamited fish. They are all floating face up with their eyes wide open and their skins a ghastly white. They are looking at me as they float by and they are saying, ‘Patton, you bastard, it’s your fault. You did this to me. You killed me.’” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“The unleavened bread of knowledge will sustain life, but it is dull fare unless it is leavened with the yeast of personality.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“You are not beaten until you admit it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“Soldiers are always contrary. I could issue them coats without buttons and I will bet that within twenty four hours they would find some, sew them on, and keep them buttoned.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“The early Christians were (in the strictly technical sense) communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days are in fact taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime.” – Richard Bentley Hart, “Introduction” to The New Testament: A Translation (emphasis in original)
“‘Knowledge is power,’ but to a degree only. Its possession per se will raise a man to mediocrity, but not to distinction.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “The Secret of Victory”
“The quickest way to get to heaven is to advance across open ground swept by effective enemy anti-tank fire.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “Use of Armored Formations, Letter of Instruction No. 3, 20 May 1944 ”
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” – attributed to Valery Legasov, in Chernobyl, by Craig Mazin
“The core values that have defined America: Honesty; Decency; Dignity; Equality; To respect everyone; To give everyone a fair shot; To give hate no safe harbor.” – President Joe Biden, “State of the Union Address,” March 7, 2024
“The thing to know about cameras and government is, if the camera is rolling, nothing really important is happening. What you’re watching is the theater. The governing will not be televised.” – Lawrence O’Donnell, “The Last Word,” February 21, 2024
“An important factor enabling the Soviets to seize the offensive and retain it is Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease food and transport particularly have been vital factors in Soviet success. Combat aircraft, upon which the Soviet Air Forces relied so greatly, have been furnished in relatively great numbers (11,300 combat planes received). Should there be a full stoppage it is extremely doubtful whether Russia could retain efficiently her all-out offensive capabilities. Even defensively the supply of Lend-Lease food and transport would play an extremely vital role. It amounts to about a million tons a year. If Russia were deprived of it, Germany could probably still defeat the U.S.S.R. Lend-Lease is our trump card in dealing with U.S.S.R. and its control is possibly the most effective means we have to keep the Soviets on the offensive in connection with the second front.” – General George C. Marshall, from a memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 31, 1944
“To establish a proper manpower balance for the United States in wartime was as difficult as it was important. The absolute ceiling on the number of men physically fit for active military service was estimated to be between fifteen and sixteen million. On the surface it was hard to understand, in the light of the available manpower pool, why there should be any U.S. manpower problem at all. Why, if Germany could maintain a military establishment of 9,835,000 or 10.9 percent of her population and Britain could support 3,885,000 or 8.2 percent of hers, did the United States manpower officials insist in late 1942 that 10,500,000 or only 7.8 percent would be the maximum force that the country could sustain without incurring serious dislocation to the American economy? The problem as well as the answer stemmed basically from the fact that the Allies had from the beginning accepted the proposition that the single greatest tangible asset the United States brought to the coalition in World War II was the productive capacity of its industry. From the very beginning, U.S. manpower calculations were closely correlated with the needs of war industry. The Army had therefore to compete for manpower not only with the needs of the other services but also with the claims of industry.” – Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare:1943-1944
“In recognition of the fact that wartime military planning was inextricably involved with foreign policy, the Army planners intensified their efforts from the spring of 1943 onward to improve liaison with the White House and State Department. By and large, the Army remained preoccupied both before and after the spring of 1943 with the more strictly military aspects of national policy. This reflected staff acceptance of the code, on which it had been working since before the war, that civilian authorities determine the ‘what’ of national policy and the military confine themselves to the ‘how.’ Yet it is also apparent that the fine line between foreign policy and military policy was becoming increasingly blurred as the war went on. The President felt compelled to take an active part in military affairs, and the Army staff found more and more that it could not keep foreign and political affairs out of its military calculations. It had become painfully clear to the staff since the summer of 1942 that political policy might not permit the armed forces to follow the quickest and most direct road to victory according to its lights.” – Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare:1943-1944
“They swarmed down upon us like locusts with a plentiful supply of planners and various other assistants with prepared plans to insure that they not only accomplished their purpose but did so in stride and with fair promise of continuing in their role of directing strategically the course of this war. I have the greatest admiration, . . . and if I were a Britisher I would feel very proud. However, as an American I wish that we might be more glib and better organized to cope with these super negotiators. From a worm’s eye viewpoint it was apparent that we were confronted by generations and generations of experience in committee work and in rationalizing points of view. They had us on the defensive practically all the time.” – General Albert C. Wedemeyer, January 22, 1943 (as quoted by Maurice Matloff in Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare:1943-1944)