“Be kind to your readers and give them exotic things when you can. In general, life is rather boring, and a writer should try to mitigate that boredom rather than contribute to it.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Do not use a thesaurus. Lists of putative synonyms do not give you a sense of any word’s most proper meaning and use. If you are trying to recall a word you know that inexplicably refuses to surface in your memory, maybe you will find it in such a volume; and perhaps, if you happen to be writing humorous verse and have come up against an intractable problem of scansion, you might find something suitable there. Otherwise, learn the meanings and uses of words by reading widely.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Never use a word simply because it is obscure, but never hesitate to use a word on account of its obscurity either.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose” (emphasis in original)
“When the occasion presents itself for using an outlandishly obscure but absolutely precise and appropriate word, use it.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Always use the word you judge most suitable for the effect you want to produce, in terms both of imagery and sound, as well as of the range of connotations and associations you want to evoke.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Always use the word that most exactly means what you wish to say, in utter indifference to how common or familiar that word happens to be. A writer should never fret over what his or her readers may or may not know, and should worry only about underestimating them.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“To propose a list of rules for writers is probably a very presumptuous thing to do. The only authority it can possibly have is one’s own example, and so offering it to the world is something of a gamble. One has to assume that one’s own writing is impressive enough to most readers to provide one with the necessary credentials for the task. If one is wrong on this score, issuing those rules will invite only ridicule.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“I do not know exactly why, in the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in English prose moved relentlessly in the direction of ever greater simplification and aesthetic minimalism. I do not even entirely regret it. Tastes change, and some of the change has been a corrective of certain excesses of the past. But, on the whole, the result has been a kind of official dogma in favor of a prose so denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality as to be often little better than infantile, not only in vocabulary but also in artistry and expressive power—a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness. Most of the fiction one reads today in literary journals is atrociously written, as are most of the essays, principally because writers have been indoctrinated in a style so rigid, barren, brutal, dry, and idiotically naïve that the best it can elicit from them is competent dullness.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“Poetry entered the world almost as early as words did; it is the first flowering of language’s intrinsic magic—its powers of invocation and apostrophe, of making the absent present and the present mysterious, of opening one mind to another. It comes most naturally to languages in their first dawn, when something elemental—something somehow pre-linguistic and not quite conscious—is still audible in them. Prose, however, evolves only when that force has been subdued by centuries upon centuries of refinement, after unconscious enchantment has been largely mastered by conscious artistry, and when the language has acquired a vocabulary of sufficient richness and a syntax of sufficient subtlety, and has fully discovered its native cadences.” – David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose”
“You should never hit anybody about God.” – Philip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews”
“Tennis is not the only sport with skew angles. Pool has skew angles and spin and backspin. But pool is murk, pool is cramped in the dark. Soccer has geometry and passing shots, but teams, not individual players like tennis. Soccer has sun, like tennis, but also many violences. Football has an ugly sound on TV in the afternoon in a care home. Football is crippling and chunky, as is rugby. Basketball has leaps, suavity, fingertips on pebbled rubber and rubber through a net. But mainly interiors again, mainly night. Cricket has too many points and a bat like a headstone. Baseball has a prospect: all that land. And baseball has apartness, like tennis, but long periods of time where nothing happens, and also that situation of so many players and the sitting and the spitting. Tennis has brutal match lengths and returns and apartness and ongoingness and sunshine. It has one player as an intelligence moving around in space. It has elegance and wreckage and bad manners.” – Joy Katz, “Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof”
“Even if stealing is an easy matter, hiding is what’s difficult.” – Anton Chekhov, “Small Fry” (trans. Constance Garnett)
“It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days or two hours labour, should be worth double what is usually the produce of one day’s or one hour’s labour. If the one species of labour should be more severe than the other, some allowance will naturally be made for this superior hardship; and the produce of one hour’s labour in the one way may frequently exchange for that of two hours labour in the other. Or if the one species of labour requires an uncommon degree of dexterity and ingenuity, the esteem which men have for such talents, will naturally give a value to their produce, superior to what would be due to the time employed about it. Such talents can seldom be acquired but in consequence of long application, and the superior value of their produce may frequently be no more than a reasonable compensation for the time and labour which must be spent in acquiring them.” – Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. One
“By the end of November 1943, the new Allied Control Commission working with the [new] Italian Government was at the end of its rope. The 1943 harvest had fallen 25 to 30 percent below normal; amassing grain under the old unpopular Fascist system completely broke down and the major portion of the short harvest found its way into the black market. Even the low 150-gram bread ration [a little more than a quarter-pound per person daily] could not be maintained, and the only way to prevent mass starvation in urban centers such as Naples seemed to be a crash program of imports.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The minor wars in Ethiopia, Spain, and Albania had placed a severe strain on the Italian economy; three years of World War II as a German ally pushed it to the brink of collapse. Italy entered the war in 1940 unprepared and was never able to mobilize her economy in efficient fashion. Though nominally an ally, Italy was forced into an economic as well as political and military dependence on Germany that left her at the mercy of the Nazi overlords of Europe. The country did not prosper under the German hegemony.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The appearance of economic order, prosperity, and self-sufficiency that Mussolini’s fascist government had been able to create was in reality only a facade that cloaked Italy’s long-standing economic ills. The country was almost entirely dependent upon the outside world for coal and oil, and much more so for essential raw materials and even foodstuffs than the Fascists admitted.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The invasion of Sicily was the first Allied operation for which there was a definite civilian supply plan prepared in advance. The plan, to cover a 90-day military period, was based on the assumption that once the dust of battle settled, Sicily would be self-sufficient except for coal and oil. For such immediate relief needs as arose, AFHQ [Allied Force Headquarters] hoped to rely mainly on stockpiles in North Africa. Only 12,100 tons of food were requested from the United States, and some thought even that quantity excessive. The Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory (AMGOT) instituted in Sicily soon found this optimism entirely unwarranted. Whether there was enough grain to provide bread for all the people was a debatable proposition, but, for the moment quantity was irrelevant, since the lack of transport, the colossal black market, farm hoarding, and the ravages of battle kept grain out of the cities. Two months after the invasion, cities such as Palermo were still living ‘hand to mouth’ with ‘not even 24 hours reserves of breadstuffs in the town.’” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The War Department, while insisting adamantly on military control over civilian supply during the initial phases of operations in overseas theaters, also sought vigorously to limit that responsibility to the narrow field of relief. This attitude in the end produced serious delays in the provision of rehabilitation supplies necessary for the resuscitation of transportation and communication facilities, and industrial and agricultural production in liberated areas. Slow progress in rehabilitation almost inevitably resulted in larger and larger demands for relief. The experience in every liberated territory pointed to the need for a balanced economic program with internal transport as perhaps the real heart of the problem. The military formula of food, fuel, and sanitary and medical supplies was therefore hardly a satisfactory one.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“If money go before, all ways do lie open.” – William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.2
“At the outset of the North African campaign, on 13 November 1942, President Roosevelt declared: ‘No one will go hungry, or without the means of livelihood in any territory occupied by the United Nations, if it is humanly possible within our power to make supplies available to them.’ This announcement heralded the beginning of a civilian supply problem that was to complicate the work of military logisticians immensely. It was not just a matter of humanitarian concern as the President’s announcement might suggest, but one of military necessity. Disease and disorder in rear areas or lack of co-operation from local governments could easily disrupt lines of communications and endanger the success of military operations.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Army and Civilian Supply – I,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“Equal quantities of labour, at all times and places, may be said to be of equal value to the labourer. In his ordinary state of health, strength and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity, he must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness. The price which he pays must always be the same, whatever may be the quantity of goods which he receives in return for it.” – Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. One
“The person who either acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power, either civil or military. His fortune may, perhaps, afford him the means of acquiring both, but the mere possession of that fortune does not necessarily convey to him either. The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is the power of purchasing.” – Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. One
“The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.” – Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. One
“Presidential elections in the United States are the dash for the cash. News outlets large and small suddenly open up their wallets and shovel out money for words, photos, video, anything that grabs eyes and ears. TOTAL COVERAGE! If you’re a freelancer, presidential elections are a gift from the news gods because it means a few months of steady paychecks, a fattened Rolodex, maybe a staff gig with juicy benefits or a sweetheart book deal.” – Dominic Gwinn, “2024 From The Back Of Dom’s Van,” December 31, 2024, Wonkette (emphasis in original)
“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. . . . It’s about learning to dance in the rain.” – Vivian Greene
“Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.” – Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. One
“America’s a hustle.” – Noelle Valdivia, “Bliss,” The Penguin
“During the first two years after the German attack in 1941 the urgency of Soviet needs had been so great, the threat of Soviet collapse so imminent and foreboding for the Allied cause, that almost any effort or sacrifice seemed justified in order to deliver supplies. This sense of urgency died hard even under the changed conditions of the last half of the war when victory over Germany and Japan seemed assured. The postwar implications of thus helping to strengthen the Soviet position in Europe and Asia were either not foreseen or ignored.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Aid to the USSR in the Later War Years,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“In the postwar period the United States was to be forced to resort to new devices to maintain a going British economy and to bolster British military strength, starting with a loan in 1946 and progressing through the Marshall Plan and the Mutual Security Program. A forthright approach to the problem in 1945 might have saved much lost time and have been more economical in the end. Certainly the restrictive attitude of the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] played some part in preventing such a forthright approach to a situation in which Presidential direction was uncertain and a practical policy vacuum existed. It seems evident that both Roosevelt and Truman, the latter perhaps belatedly after Potsdam, saw the need for helping the British in their postwar economic adjustment, but Roosevelt’s hand was faltering in the last six months of his life and he did not take the necessary steps either to lay down a clear policy for the executive branch to follow or to secure the legislative authority that would have made the course of his successor easier. Without legislative authority, Truman felt his hands were tied, and lend-lease was allowed to lapse without any real consideration of how it might be used as an effective instrument of U.S. policy in promoting postwar adjustments—just as it had been used during hostilities as an extremely effective means for fighting a coalition war.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The End of the Common Pool,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945
“The British did not have quite the same respect for the ‘scientific’ calculation of requirements that the Americans at least professed to have, and regarded the end result as merely an educated guess. It is at least possible that American insistence that the British determine their requirements far in advance was also conditioned less by their confidence in anybody’s ability to do so than by their desire to keep production plans stable and not allow them to be continually disrupted by British demands for bits and pieces.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Lend-Lease and the Common Pool,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945