Once an Eagle Quotes

“That's the whole challenge of life - to act with honor and hope and generosity, no whatter what you've drawn. You can't help when or what you were born, you may not be able to help how you die; but you can - and you should - try to pass the days between as a good man.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“if it comes to a choice between being a good soldier and a good human being -- try to be a good human being".”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“We stand at an immense fork in the raod. One way is the path of generosity, dignity and a respect for other races and customs; the other leads most certainly to greed, suspicion, hatered and the old, bloody course of violence and waste - and now, God help us, to the very destruction of all the struggles and triumphs of the human race on this earth. My old friends and fellow townsmen: which will it be?”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“God, help me. Help me to be wise and full of courage and sound judgment. Harden my heart to the sights that I must see so soon again, grant me only the power to think clearly, boldly, resolutely, no matter how unnerving the peril. Let me not fail them.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“You can’t help what you were born and you may not have much to say about where you die, but you can and you should try to pass the days in between as a good man.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“The essence of leadership was an unerring ability to winnow the essential from the trivial or extraneous.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“in”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“the romantic, spendthrift moral act is ultimately the practical one—the practical, expendient, cozy-dog move is the one that comes to grief.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“They lack the ultimate audacity.” Caldwell nodded, frowning. “They possess a certain inventiveness, they plan superbly, they execute with ferocity and care. But then there comes that moment.” He glanced at his son-in-law with a quick, fond smile. “That terribly lonely moment when you must make a further decision—a huge one. One that has nothing to do with everything you’ve anticipated. With the whole future in doubt, with hopelessly inadequate information and exhausted from the strain of the battles already fought, you have to summon up all your energies and decide, quickly and clearly; and act.” He took his pipe from his mouth. “That’s where they break down.” MacConnadin”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“Have you ever felt that, Ts’an Tsan?—a hunger for knowledge so desperate you begrudge food and sleep, you cannot wait for another dawn to get on to more and more?” Damon nodded. “Yes. Well, I had that fever. I had to know: it was more important than life.” From”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“the whole challenge of life [is] to act with honor and hope and generosity.… You can’t help when or what you were born”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“Inflexibility—it was the worst human failing: you could learn to check impetuosity, you could overcome fear through confidence and laziness through discipline, but rigidity of mind allowed for no antidote. It carried the seeds of its own destruction.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“One of the most memorable passages in the book, which I have never forgotten, occurs when Sam Damon counsels his young son, “the whole challenge of life [is] to act with honor and hope and generosity.… You can’t help when or what you were born, you may not be able to help how you die; but you can—and you should—try to pass the days between as a good man.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“and”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“the whole challenge of life [is] to act with honor and hope and generosity.… You can’t help when or what you were born, you may not be able to help how you die; but you can—and you should—try to pass the days between as a good man.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“Accept what you are and go on from there. You can’t change the circumstances of your birth and condition—it’s unprofitable to torture yourself with too much speculation as to why you’ve been placed in existence at a given point in time …” Then, touched by the need to pass on to his son and heir the doubtful legacy of his own strained and arrant experience, a sense of continuity of effort from father to son—or perhaps it was only the brandy—he’d added: “That’s the whole challenge of life—to act with honor and hope and generosity, no matter what you’ve drawn. You can’t help when or what you were born, you may not be able to help how you die; but you can—and you should—try to pass the days between as a good man …”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“Was he turning into a circumspect subaltern, loyal to the point of subservience, drowning moral principle in the common good, a perfect tool for the arrogant and conniving--was he becoming the kind of soldier he'd always hated and despised? Ben--Ben would tell Massengale to go fornicate with himself, Ben would already have beaten him to jelly with one arm...”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“Ai-la!" one exclaimed. "Erh-pen kwei-t'a ma-ti..." and Damon smiled through his weariness. Men cursed the same way in any language. The Japanese were certainly mother defilers, any way you looked at them...”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“I emerged a corporal three years later in a state of great turmoil, at the core of which was an angry awareness of war as the most vicious and fraudulent self-deception man had ever devised.”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“entirely, and he could hear the boy’s slow, labored breathing. God Almighty, he thought. He had seen some bad things; some pretty bad things in seventeen years of soldiering. Done them, too. At Werbomont,”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“That part of his life was over; and now, lying on the dense mat of grass, he knew in one sense it always had been. But it was fun remembering … The”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“Postwar America would bear no more similarity to prewar America than the Restoration Monarchy bore to Revolutionary France; what would emerge would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta—and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media … it was so clear! Why couldn’t the dunderheads see it? Whoever could see it—whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of its boiling crest—would hold the future securely in his fine right hand”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle

“Postwar America would bear no more similarity to prewar America than the Restoration Monarchy bore to Revolutionary France; what would emerge would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta—and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media”
― Anton Myrer, Once an Eagle