The Shrew
Since Jul 8, 1998
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The Shrew
Since Jul 8, 1998
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Favorite quotes of The Shrew
Μολὼν λαβέ!!
“A Marine is a Marine. I set that policy two weeks ago – there’s no such thing as a former Marine. You’re a Marine, just in a different uniform and you’re in a different phase of your life. But you’ll always be a Marine because you went to Parris Island, San Diego or the hills of Quantico. There’s no such thing as a former Marine.”
General James F. Amos, 35th Commandant of the Marine Corps
From George Orwell's 1984
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
"Watergate was a coup d'etat by an obsessed press, acting in collusion with corrupt elements of the national police to bring down a president who had routed the Left in a 49-state landslide. By 1972, the liberals couldn't beat Nixon any other way." Patrick J. Buchanan June 15, 2005
CNN's Jeff Greenfield: "The people have spoken -- the bastards!" November 3, 2004
John Kerry's assault on this country did not rise fullblown in his mind, like Venus from the Cypriot Sea. It is the crystallization of an assault upon America which has been fostered over the years by an intellectual class given over to self-doubt and self-hatred, driven by a cultural disgust with the uses to which so many people put their freedom. The assault on the military, the many and subtle vibrations of which you feel as keenly as James Baldwin knows the inflections of racism, is an assault on the proposition that what we have, in America, is truly worth defending.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr., commencement address at West Point, June 8, 1971
Referenced from: WinterSoldier.com
Calvin: "Dad, what's a control freak?"
Calvin's Dad: "That's what lazy, slipshod, careless, cut-corner workers call anyone who cares enough to do something right."
Calvin: "Am I in the presence of their king? Should I kneel?"
Calvin's Dad: "If anything works in this world, it's because one of us took charge."
Bill Watterson
Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat
If you take a flat map, and move wooden blocks
upon it strategically, the thing looks well.
The blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks
and getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
and flat maps turn into country where creeks
and gullies hamper your wooden squares.
They stick in the brush, they are tired and rest,
they straggle after ripe blackberries,
and you cannot lift them up into your hand
and move them."
Stephen Vincent Benet
"A man can die but once; we owe God a death."
William ShakespeareHenry IV Part III, ii,
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children what it was once like in the United States when men were free."
-- Ronald Reagan
"God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."John 3:16
"A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another."John 13:27
"If we are mark'd to die, we are enow- William Shakespeare
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'>br? This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
To all my brothers, I salute you!
"We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. The lesson of Vietnam, I think, should be that never again will young Americans be asked to fight and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful that we, as a nation, pledge our full resources to achieve victory as quickly as possible."-
--Ronald Reagan (1974)
From: My American Journeyby General Colin Powell
Page 291-292
What I saw from my perch in the Pentagon was America sticking its hand into a thousand-year-old hornet nest with the expectation that our mere presence might pacify the hornets. When ancient ethnic hatreds re-ignited in the former Yugoslavia in 1991 and well-meaning Americans thought we should "do something" in Bosnia, the shattered bodies of Marines at the Beirut airport were never far from my mind arguing for caution. There are times when American lives must be risked and lost. Foreign policy cannot be paralyzed by the prospect of casualties. But lives must not be risked until we can face a parent or a spouse or a child with a clear answer to the question of why a member of that family had to die. To provide a "symbol" or a "presence" is not good enough.
Page 302-303
I knew that Weinberger, for all his outward self-possesion, had been deeply troubled by the tragic bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. I did not realize how deeply until a singular draft document came out of his office. He asked me to take a look at it and circulate it to the administration's national security team. Weinberger had applied his formidable lawyerly intellect to an analysis of when and when not to commit United States military forces abroad. He was put off by fancy phrases like "interpositional forces" and "presence" that turned out to mean putting U.S. troops in harm's way without a clear mission. He objected toour troops being "used" in the worst sense of that word. He had come up with six tests for determining when to commit American forces.
Weinberger's antagonist, George Schultz, was dismissive of Cap's approach. I had watched the irony of their squabbling for months. The Secretary of State was often ready to commit America's military might, even in a no-man's-land like Lebanon. What was the point of maintaining a military force if you did not whack somebody occasionally to demonstrate your power? On the other side was the man responsible for the forces that would have to do the bleeding and dying, arguing against anything but crucial commitments.
Not only did Weinberger want to sell his guidelines inside the administration; he wanted to go public that summer. We started considering possible speaking platforms, but White House political operatives nixed any such controversial speech until the election was over. After Reagan's reelection, Weinberger addressed the National Press Club on November 28. I went with him to hear him describe the tests he recommended "when we are weighing the use of U.S. combat forces abroad."
(1) Commit only if our or our allies' vital interests are at stake.
(2) If we commit, do so with all the resources necessary to win.
(3) Go in only with clear political and military objectives.
(4) Be ready to change the commitment if the objectives change, since wars rarely stand still.
(5)Only take on commitments that can gain the support of the American people and the Congress.
(6)Commit U.S. forces only as a last resort.
In short, is the national interest at stake? If the answer is yes, go in, and go in to win. Otherwise, stay out.