“The stupidity and blindness of American power, which, in its own terms is perfectly ‘logical’—and yet its terms are fantastically arbitrary and respond only to the ‘reality’ of a thinking that goes on within an artificial and closed system. To defend your own reality and then impose it forcefully on the outside world is paranoia.”
Thomas Merton
more infosource: October 25, 1967 journal entry in The Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 5.
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category: delusion, government, paranoia, politics, reality, war
medium: Journal
“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
Robert Gates
more infosource: Speech delivered to cadets at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, February 25, 2011.
category: General MacArthur, military, politics, war
medium: speech
“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
Richard Holbrooke
more infosource: his last words to his Pakistani surgeon and family members as he was sedated for surgery, “Richard Holbrooke Dies,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post, December 14, 2010.
category: Afghanistan, last words, politics, war
medium: Obituary
“I stood as close to them as I could without being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.”
Michael Herr
more infosource: Dispatches (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009), 62.
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category: brutality, distance, proximity, vantage point, war
medium: nonfiction
notes: quoted by Mary Karr in her Twitter feed
“I got a letter from a lightning rod company this morning trying to put the fear of God in me, but with small success. Lightning seems to have lost its menace. Compared to what is going on on earth today, heaven’s firebrands are penny fireworks with wet fuses.”
E. B. White
more infosource: “Removal,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 5.
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category: fireworks, lightning, nature, perspective, war
medium: essay
notes: White wrote this essay in July 1938.
war