How damned ridiculous it all is! The long generations toiling--skimping, lashing themselves screwing higher and higher the tension... of their minds, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of intelligence to end in this--My God what a time--All the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas--The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men--the heroics about war--my country right or wrong--oh infinities of them! Oh the tragic farce of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering of sublimities,... Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world had still kept head in air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've been aboard this destroyer for two weeks now, and we've already been through four air attacks. I'm in the war at last, Doc. I... caught up with that task force that passed me by. I'm glad to be here. I had to be here, I guess. But I'm thinking now of you, Doc, and you, Frank, and Dolan, and Dawdy, and Insignia, and everyone else on that bucket. All the guys everywhere who sailed from tedium to apathy and back again with an occasional sidetrip to monotony. This is a tough crew on here and they have a wonderful battle record. But I've discovered, Doc, that the unseen enemy of this war is the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a terrible sort of suicide. And I know now that the ones who refuse to surrender to it are the strongest of all. Right now, I'm looking at something that's hanging over my desk, a preposterous hunk of brass attached to the most bilious piece of ribbon I've ever seen. I'd rather have it than the Congressional Medal of Honor. It tells me what I'll always be proudest of, that at a time in the world when courage counted most, I lived among sixty-two brave men. So Doc, and especially you, Frank, don't let those guys down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing, ...never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before... air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents--or at least their staffs--never stop making mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, n...either shall they learn war any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Co...ngress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »