The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1)

by Herman Wouk

and new leadership came up out of the sewers, where realism runs and change often starts.

He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism,

unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It

The moon floats out in space, some thirty diameters of the earth away, shining on the just and the unjust as the cloud cover allows.

But Hitler was incapable of listening to anybody.

Profit was the difference between what the worker produced and what he got.

The big bourgeois powers like France, England, and America built their strength and expanded their territory by actions indistinguishable from armed robbery. Having achieved their “manifest destiny,” they found it easy, of course, to scold a young vigorous Germany seeking to play its world role in turn.

We Germans have always lacked the singular Anglo-Saxon gift for cloaking self-interest in pious moral attitudes. We honestly say what we think, and thus invariably shock the tender sensibilities of Western politicians and writers.

In a world so rich and lovely, could his children find nothing better to do than to dig iron from the ground and work it into vast grotesque engines for blowing each other up?