Hideous Dream Quotes

“I’ve never actually seen the military used to any higher moral purpose. There is always the bottom line, somewhere, somehow.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“So here I am, a white man telling Black children to not give white people the benefit of the doubt. It’s not prejudice I’m giving them, it’s survival. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t trust white folk you don’t know. Don’t trust cops. The basics. When Black folk don’t want to walk right up and be my friend, I don’t take it personally, and I don’t get defensive. And I’ll tell other thin-skinned white people the same thing. It’s not personal. It’s survival. Get used to it, and quit whining.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Stupidity is a tough, fecund thing, like crabgrass.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“There’s a trendy phrase making the rounds among intellectuals these days: compassion fatigue. We’ve just grown so tired of caring so much about the suffering of little black children in the Mississippi Delta, about the barbarism directed at gays and lesbians, about the murders of Salvadoran peasants, that we just really don’t have the energy to give a fuck any more … Compassion is a luxury of comfort, often paternalistic, frequently a thin veil over contempt. Solidarity is a much tougher proposition.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Race was an issue because in every assignment I have had in Special Operations, racism has been as much a part of the social bond as football and fast cars. I never cared for either of them either, but this was special.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Uniforms standardize the way we recognize military members who outrank us, so we can avoid ass chewings for failure to refer to someone as sergeant or sir or your majesty, or for failure to salute them.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“The appearance of precision and order are so important to military commanders because they are generally idiots who couldn’t plan a decent cocktail party, especially the bureaucrats who float to the top of the Officer Personnel Management System. They require the appearance of precision and order because their operations, this one being emblematic, are goat fucks.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“If being a perfect soldier meant continuing to follow any fucking order I was given, then I would have to settle for being a mediocre soldier.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“I felt small, like one does when the distance between stars occasionally asserts itself into your understanding, like when your own death’s inevitability leaps in front of you in the middle of the night when you get up to pee.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Young professionals, I reminded myself, sympathetic as they may seem with a disarming modesty, are always necessarily invested in conservatism.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“When you are massively outgunned, you do not fire and give away your position.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Racism—if you look closely—is about profit. The whole system was built on it. War—if you look closely—is about profit. Poverty, which is not, and never has been, an accident—if you look closely—is about profit.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“The academic is sharing in the bourgeois’ loot, in a hundred little ways. And the peasant understands necessity as something that transcends mortality. To be in community with that peasant, the Chapel Hill academic will have to commit class suicide.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti