Charles

“Then, too, the senate has a rule that no point is discussed on the same day it is brought up, but rather it is put off till the next meeting; they do this so that someone who blurts out the first thing that occurs to him will not proceed to think up arguments to defend his position instead of looking for what is of use to the commonwealth, being willing to damage the public welfare rather than his own reputation, ashamed, as it were, in a perverse and wrong-headed way, to admit that his first view was short-sighted. From the start such a person should have taken care to speak with deliberation rather than haste.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“Be a pineapple: Stand tall, wear a crown, and be sweet on the inside.”
― Katherine Gaskin

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers

“I wrote this book to explain to my own satisfaction how the United States won every battle in and over Vietnam and yet lost the war. Such a defeat is unprecedented in the annals of military history. And we did lose the war. Our objective was to preserve South Vietnam as an ‘independent, non-Communist state,’ and we obviously failed to do that. Refusing to accept this defeat, or saying that we won the shooting war, may assuage our bruised egos, but it oversimplifies the conflict and distorts our understanding of its true nature…
- Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946-1975”
― Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam At War: The History 1946-1975