Herman Wouk Quotes

When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

Remember this, if you can--there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven't. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end--only in the end it becomes more obvious.

The girl you marry and the woman you must make a life with are two different people.

Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most.

I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.

Religious discipline is nothing but a permanent psychic shelter. You stay inside it, and you’re less vulnerable to whatever horrors happen in life.

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.

He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star, and for the moment it was enough to be where she was.

So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood's barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up.

The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.

Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours; there is no life without them.

Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.

I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off.

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, "How would I do this if I were a fool?" Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.

Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.

The trouble started one morning when there was a fog.

It’s occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.

She had learned from her encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world-the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls.

You can’t understand command till you’ve had it. It’s the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It’s a nightmare, unless you’re an ox. You’re forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes.

He’s too clever to be wise, if that makes any sense. Very

IT IS BETTER TO KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND LET PEOPLE THINK YOU’RE A FOOL, THAN TO OPEN IT AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT.

usurpation.

The will not to believe. It is simple human nature. When the mind cannot grasp or face up to a horrible fact it turns away, as though refusing credence will conjure away the reality.

Money is a very pleasant thing, Willie, and I think you can trade almost anything for it wisely except the work you really want to do. If you sell out your time for a comfortable life, and give up your natural work, I think you lose the exchange. There remains an inner uneasiness that spoils the comforts.

Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu--and a recognizable part--unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return.

There are no difficulties that can’t be overcome,

Can’t stop a Nazi with a lawbook.

Cabs, cabs! Why did God give you feet? Walk me to Fiftieth.

of writers, musicians, an actress, some other new girls like me. There

She was, in fact, Katharine Hepburn, playing a store clerk in the first reel of a smart comedy

So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it.

It’s not money, but what you can buy with it. Money is power. Money is security. Money is freedom.

the one loophole that military wisdom can never quite button up—the sympathy of the downtrodden for each other.

Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.

Neville did a remarkable simulation of running in fourteen directions at once, whimpering, screeching, and snapping his teeth. The seder stopped

steamy day, and though the windows of the oval study were open, the room was oppressively hot. “You know Captain Henry, of course, Admiral? His boy’s just gotten his wings at Pensacola.

All the corpses must be brought back from the work site for the evening roll call, since the count of living and dead has to match the number of men who left in the morning, to establish that nobody has escaped Auschwitz except by dying.

Tocqueville long ago marked as the great weakness of a democracy in his unforgettable phrase, “the tyranny of the majority.” The pressure to emulate neighbors, the urge to conform to popular views and manners, the deep fear of being different

The lesson was writ plain by Thucydides centuries before Christ was born. Democracy satisfies best the human thirst for freedom; yet, being undisciplined, turbulent, and luxury-seeking, it falls time and again to austere single-minded despotism.

no man who rises to command of a United States naval ship can possibly be a coward. And

The clear intent of our law is to enable a man to live in the world and yet hold his faith close to his daily thoughts.

A Talmud saying implies that in Messianic times the sacrifices will not be resumed in the restored Temple, except for the thank offerings.

No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.

You can't assume a goddamned thing in this Navy.

Duce, damn your whipped-cream soul, do you know anything that can clear up this crazy mess?

Either war is finished, or we are.

don’t make the mistake of skipping the Old Testament. It’s the core of all religion, I

Aye aye, sir.” Willie saluted and emerged into the sunlight, through the one loophole that military wisdom can never quite button up—the sympathy of the downtrodden for each other.

This country of ours consists of pioneers, after

Look at a politician, eighty years old, making a speech to a crowd in the rain. What's driving him? Not ambition. He’s been a senator for forty years. He can never be anything more. But by winning this election he can have one more Hit. He’d rather die of pneumonia than risk missing the Hit.

smoochers....Blob after blob after blob...squirming in the dark is a clever night's work....When they're all being shoved by body chemicals through a mindless mechanical process, like so many pairs of stuck-together frogs.

The Jewish Sabbath may be too hard for some people, or they may not subscribe to its ideas; but within its own terms it is a dramatic ceremony penetrating all of life. It is not simply a day off. This demanding rite turns twenty-four hours of every week into a separated time, apart in mood, texture, acts, and events from daily existence.

Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.

Marjorie, your lack of self-knowledge is fabulous. Being a Jew is your whole life. Good Lord, you don’t eat bacon. I’ve seen you shove it off your plate as though it were a dead mouse.” “Well, I can’t help that, it’s habit.” Noel shook

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.

Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and fearful. It would be just as silly to assert that disbelief in God is a crutch for the immoral and the ill-read.

With the smoke of the dead sailor's cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts--not the words, the realities--break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime.

In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn. For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world's worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet thought their bones like in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.

You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven’t. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end—only at the end it becomes more obvious. Use your time while you have it, Willie, in making something of yourself.

the DeMille films were foolishness. I was born to do this, and I can do it precisely because I thought the whole religion through when I broke away. It takes someone who knows—not believes—to capture and picture the storytelling truth about Moishe Rabenu in a film.

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.

You’re not supposed to love Jews necessarily, just to give them a fair shake.

The UN is all screams and twitters, like a ladies’ room when a guy barges in. A

I almost died, and I realized that all I regretted was you.

scruple

But war is no respecter of limits, it is by definition harsh and inhuman, and there is no preparing for it.

Please tell Field Marshal Goring for me, to stick his Swiss bank account up his fat ass.

I have a heart of gold. My only faults are that I’m totally selfish and immoral.

I offer the book, relying on the maxim of Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of the Fathers: The work is not yours to finish; but neither are you free to take no part in it.

Parlor talk seems to me on much more promising ground worrying over conformity than gnawing the bones of Freud.

main

experience nine times out of ten is merely stupidity hardened into habit.—Well,

on having dinner with us.

The Caine was a pile of junk in the last hours of decay, manned by hoodlums.

What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear, in the way that best honors one's intelligence and one's birth. Part 2 THE FAITH

Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end - only at the end it becomes more obvious.

The Kwajalein invasion, the first of these,

In our own tradition, and on the basis of the words of Hebrew Scripture, there is not the faintest doubt that Moses is not only the source of Judaism under God, but its high reach as well.

Individually the Germans were remarkably like Americans; he thought it curious that both peoples had the eagle for their national emblem. The Germans were the same sort of businesslike go-getters: direct, roughly humorous, and usually reliable and able.

He still had not the slightest understanding of why he had really come; he blamed himself for a late flare of desire crudely masked as a need for advice. He had no way of recognizing the very common impulse of a husband to talk things over with his wife.

Willie didn't have a historian's respect for the victories at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Midway. The stream of news as it burbled by his mind left only a confused impression that our side was a bit ahead in the game, but making painful slow work of it. He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn't know that he knew. This war seemed to him different from all the others: diffuse, slogging, and empty of drama.

Germany’s grand aim, he says, must be a Nordic racial alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east.

I feel like having a cigar, too, right this second. I'm full of queer yens. Can it be that I"m pregnant? Intellectually, maybe. Stop me if I start eating chalk. I'll be righ tback. You know, I dont' smoke half a dozen cigars a year. But this one tastes ambrosial.

Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don’t understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it’s an ongoing miracle of sorts.

A language has genius. Some works translate well, others are untranslatable. Molière is effective only in French. Without knowing Arabic nobody has ever understood the Koran. Pushkin remains a possession of the Russian people, though the world has acquired Tolstoy. In general, the higher the charge of peculiarly national identity and emotion, the less translatable a work is.

the nameless maiden in the advertisement was like a thousand other clothing models he had seen in magazines—arched brows, big eyes, angular cheeks, pouting mouth, a fetching figure, and a haughty, revolted look, as though someone had just offered her a jellyfish to hold.

Remember this, if you can—there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven’t. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end—only at the end it becomes more obvious. Use your time while you have it, Willie, in making something of yourself.

This particular argument was pleasanter than most, because the person setting me straight was a pretty seventeen-year-old girl, a college sophomore, and it was no strain to smile at her with good humor as she went about her work.

anodyne

have. He really PURSUED me, in a gentlemanly way, showing

jocose

had religion as a kid, motek. It hangs on like malaria, and breaks out now and then.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.” “Roland

Sex takes up a very small part of the day, anyway.” “It makes the rest of the day worth living.” “You

There are good and bad things in all political systems.

I think appreciating Dickens goes with ten thousand in the bank.

Judaism takes the verse in Genesis, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' as part of its statutory law. Because it is the first law in the Torah it holds a special eminence.

It was going to be a tough ten years, he thought, for men with grown sons. Warren

Of course the Russians under Zhukov were

shot at. All I did at Wotje was lose control

The reason for the prosperity of the wicked, and also for the troubles of the good, is not in our hands.” Then

A democracy in a backward or unstable country simply gets smashed by the best-organized power gang.

enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall.

our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.

But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.

They were invited to fine homes and exclusive clubs. It was a great war.

screws on the cowlings. Only a divine miracle

Not that I really think the Caine is inanimate. It’s an iron poltergeist sent into the world by God

For the rest the Navy is a third-rate career for third-rate people, offering a sort of skimpy security in return for twenty or thirty years of a polite penal servitude.

dithyramb coming to majestic life: a swarm of fresh seapower

assailing her. Were they doing the

Henry wondered all through the meal whether Warren

Oaths, blasphemies, and one recurring four-letter word filled the air like fog.

Remember this, if you can—there is nothing, nothing more precious than time.

test

The circle of gleaming green numbers on the black face of the gyroscope compass ticked steadily counterclockwise and the heading increased: 95 degrees, 100, 105, 120, 150. Queeg

Tell me, Briny,” Natalie said, “are you still having fun?” He looked around at the noisy, crowded, evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. “More fun than a barrel of monkeys.

food disciplines are part of every great religion. Psychologically they're almost inevitable, and extremely practical....Religious discipline is nothing but a permanent psychic shelter.

in an industrial world the many cannot rule themselves, that they must drift into ever greater sloth, indifference, anarchy, self-seeking, dreaminess, and moral decay. Power flows to the cunning, and the rule of the many becomes the rule of money.

Rose, you’re good, you’re like a sister.” The mother expelled a long sigh, puffing out her cheeks. She looked from the girl to the old man. “I keep trying to fix everything. Why? It’s God’s world.” She kissed them both. “Take care of yourselves. And…

See, the Germans aren’t kidding about the Jews. They’re cooking us down to soap over there. They think we’re vermin and should be ’sterminated and our corpses turned into something useful.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s astute production chief, is reported to have chided an American Air Force general, after the war, for not laying on more raids like Dresden; it was the sovereign way to end the war, he said, but the Allies failed to follow through.

22 Emily’s Letters After the Suez fiasco, Great Britain and France were no longer serious players in the Middle East, and Israel was tarred as their co-conspirator in a failed last gasp of imperialism.

What did they care if the rabbis who found them with the books of haskala, of enlightenment, called them epicureans, atheists, breakers of the wall? These old epithets they began to take as names of honor. Out of their ranks came the minds and spirits that created modern Zionism. The fact that Zionism was cradled against the separatist learning of the old yeshivas colors the state of Israel to this hour.

Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.

War has always been violent blindman’s buff, played with men’s lives and nations’ resources. But the time for it is over. As the race has outgrown human sacrifice, human slavery, and duelling, it has to outgrow war.

Noel said, "You assume the American people are too dumb to recognize a good thing. It's an anti-democratic notion, did you ever stop to think of that? They're not too dumb to elect the right president. Or, so we all believe. "Will you ever get it through your head that a movie house is a candy store?...You try to sell them bread and spinach in your candy store and they'll go to the candy store around the corner. You get the reputation for being a stupid bastard, and after a while your candy store closes.

Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identiy, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of the ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before.

Morgenstern settled the matter, in her customary way, by going into the kitchen and coming out with a large soup plate from her best china set. She called the couple to the dining-room table, and told them to take hold of the plate and break it on the table. They did so, looking puzzled at each other. The fragments flew all over the floor, and the parents embraced each other, shouting

To sum up: whatever fictional liberties have been taken in weaving the phantoms of my invention through real events, The Hope is presented to my readers as an honest account of Israel’s early history, as true and responsible as research could make it. As to whether the tale itself pleases, only they can judge.

The officers had tried very hard to make the crew look respectable for the occasion; but despite the shoeshines and new dungarees and shaved faces the general effect was that of a group of tramps freshly deloused by the Salvation Army.

Extremism, he says, is the universal tuberculosis of modern society: a world infection of resentment and hatred generated by rapid change and the breakdown of old values. In the stabler nations the tubercles are sealed off in scar tissue, and these are the harmless lunatic movements. In times of social disorder, depression, war, or revolution, the germs can break forth and infect the nation. This has happened in Germany. It could happen anywhere, even in the United States.

South Wind had been, in Marjorie’s visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last find herself and be herself—clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word, it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar.

And my revulsion wasn't against your religion, but all religions. They’re all more or less alike. You can’t blame the human race for preferring some bright storyteller’s dream or other to the black cold meaningless dark of the real universe.

The toiling masses,' and all that. This country has no toiling masses, we have Dan at the diner and Verne in the mine and Jerry in the steel mill and Burdette at the filling station and so on. They don't toil, for Christ's sake, they do a day's work and then they go home and have a beer. You can't get them into a mass for anything. If there's a good ball game on TV they won't come out to see the president ride by.

Well, normality, you know, is a fiction in psychiatry. It’s all relative. No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.

lordosis?

...the longest I'm in Washington the more I realize that most people in this town tend to act with the calm forethought of a beheaded chicken.

People who can solve a lot of problems by simply dying are the ones who hang on and on.

to

We transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs who

play

face grew longer and grimmer as Berel

The big bourgeois powers like France, England, and America built their strength and expanded their territory by actions indistinguishable from armed robbery.

The girl you marry, and the woman you must make a life with, are two different people.

and

religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world—the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls. As long as there were two, there could be three, or ten; it was a question of good luck or God’s blessing when she would

Phil’s a slow-thinking sort, so I usually tied him up. He’s one of the few communists I’ve ever been able to stand. They’re like the abolitionists. Their cause may be just, but their personalities are repulsive. I don’t really know whether they’re right or not, and I don’t care.

I like novels where the author proves how terrible military guys are, and how superior sensitive civilians are. I know they’re true to life because I’m a sensitive civilian myself.” He puffed at the cigar, made a mouth of distaste, and threw it into a brass jar half full of sand.

I’ve given up. This ship is an outcast, manned by outcasts, and named for the great outcast of mankind. My destiny is the Caine. It’s the purgatory for my sins.” “Any interesting sins, Tom?

My view is that Hitler and the Nazis have grown out of the heart of German culture—a cancer, maybe, but a uniquely German phenomenon. Some very clever men have given me hell for holding this opinion. They insist the same thing could have happened anywhere, given the same conditions: defeat in a major war, a harsh peace treaty, ruinous inflation, mass unemployment, communism on the march, anarchy in the streets—all leading to the rise of a demagogue, and a reign of terror.

about Sidney, who wants to be a writer or a forest ranger or a composer or anything except what his father is, because he’s ashamed of his father being a Jew, or because he thinks he’s too sensitive for business or law, whatever the damned Freudian reason may be—and he ends up in his father’s business just the same. I’ve opened my apartment door to enough of those.” Noel crooked

The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: 'Don't kill; don't be vile; don't steal; don't tell lies about others; don't envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.' This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of "Thou Shalt Nots" is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing.

Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He

Then followed an incredible tactical blunder. With the British expeditionary force helplessly retreating toward the sea, but far behind in the race and about to be cut off by Guderian’s massed tanks, the Führer halted Guderian on the River Aa, nine miles from Dunkirk, and forbade the tank divisions to advance for three days! To this day nobody has factually ascertained why he did this. Theories are almost as abundant as military historians, but they add little to the facts. During these three days the British rescued their armies from the Dunkirk beaches. That is the long and short of the “miracle of Dunkirk.

In Judaism praying for benefits is a very small part of the liturgy. Most of it is commitment of one's fortunes to God, and meditation on sacred writings which put in clear words the few great points of our religion. Its daily aim is a renewal of religious energy through an act which declares one's Jewish identity and one's hope in the Lord.

Churchill was exactly the kind of brilliant amateur meddler in military affairs that Hitler was. Both rose to power from the depths of political rejection. Both relied chiefly on oratory to sway the multitude. Both somehow expressed the spirits of their peoples and so won loyalty that outnumbered any mistakes, defeats and disasters. Both thought in grandiose terms, knew little about economic and logistical realities, and cared less. Both were iron men in defeat. Above all, both men had overwhelming personalities that could silence rational opposition when they talked.

Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and

It was like the hate of a husband for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreakable tie to a loathsome person, and existing not as a self-justification, but for the rotten gleam of pleasure it gave off in the continuing gloom. Out

How far they came to perish here, these soldiers and these machines! What bizarre train of events brought youngsters from the Rhineland and Prussia, from the Scottish Highlands and London, from Australia and New Zealand, to butt at each other to the death with flame-spitting machinery in faraway Africa, in a setting as dry and lonesome as the moon? But that is the hallmark of this war. No other war has ever been like it. This war rings the world.... Men fight as far from home as they can be transported, with courage and endurance that makes one proud of the human race, in horrible contrivances that make one ashamed of the human race.

The old novels are all about Jane Austen and Dickens heroines who'd as soon put bullets through their heads as let a man kiss them. And, the new novels are...about Brett Ashley, who sleeps with any guy who really insists, but is a poetic pure tortured soul at heart....She talks Lady Brett and acts Shirley, handling the situation on the whole with remarkable willpower----'...'It doesn't take too much willpower, ' Marjorie burst out,...'with most of the boys, who are plain animals, and just need slapping down. And it doesn't take much willpower either wth the conceited intellectuals who try to disarm you by telling you that you're frigid. They're just amusing.

took a couple of pork slices; and by dipping them completely in mustard sauce she got them down without any trouble. Eating the pork gave her an odd sense of freedom, and at the same time, though she suppressed it, a twinge of disgust. She asked Noel for another highball.

Scholars call it [the Torah] the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were Hebrew scribes of the first centuries of the present era. They fixed the wording and spelling of the Bible; since then it has not changed. It has long been a matter of critical controversy as to just how accurate the Masoretes were; for one thing, did they have a true text from ancient sources, or did they invent and corrupt? Opinion has swayed back and forth on this point. The excitement over the Dead Sea Scrolls came in part from their substantial authentication of the Masoretic Isaiah.

The Talmud is not only an encyclopedia of law but a work of folk art, a hymn to the Lord rising out of many generations of men who spent their lives in the quest for him. This quest for God, the confident search for the holy in every busy detail of life, is its grand single theme. The Talmud recaptures a long golden age of intelligence and insight, and it is to this day the circulating heart's blood of the Jewish religion.

She didn’t waver or change countenance at all; she continued her grave descent. But in an instant, as though green gelatins had been slid one by one in front of every light in the ballroom, she saw the scene differently. She saw a tawdry mockery of sacred things, a bourgeois riot of expense, with a special touch of vulgar Jewish sentimentality. The gate of roses behind her was comical; the flower-massed canopy ahead was grotesque; the loud whirring of the movie camera was a joke, the scrambling still photographer in the empty aisle, twisting his camera at his eye, a low clown. The huge diamond on her right hand capped the vulgarity; she could feel it there; she slid a finger to cover it. Her husband waiting for her under the canopy wasn’t a prosperous doctor, but he was a prosperous lawyer; he had the mustache Noel had predicted; with macabre luck Noel had even guessed the initials. And she—she was Shirley, going to a Shirley fate, in a Shirley blaze of silly costly glory. All this passed

I have found out what it's like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn't realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn't automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply

to you, I have never known anything like it. But I have brains enough to know that a bed takes up a very small space in a house, and that you don’t spend a marriage sleeping with a person but waking with her. It’s the waking part with you that I will no longer endure, come hell or high water. I will not be driven on and on to that looming goal, a love nest in the suburbs. I WANT NO PART OF IT OR OF YOU, do you understand? If I had

tradition of liberation from Egypt, under a lawgiver and deliverer named Moses. We are called Jews, and our heritage Judaism, because in the political decline and fall of our nation the tribe which held out longest and became the surviving remnant in exile predicted by the Torah was named Judah.

He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief. 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? Yet this madness was the way of the world.

I have found out what it's like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn't realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn't automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply amazing degree of control!

Nothing testified more to the evanescence of position and wealth in Beverly Hills than its architecture. There was money in abundance to put up the settings of the grand life. But land—the one true mark of stable grandeur—was not to be had. The town was an industrial compound of the temporarily well-paid.

rabbis knew best. The marvelous warmth and intimacy of your ceremonies tonight! Even the little family quarrel only made things more lively. It gave the evening—well, tang. I was going to say bite, but I’d better not.” He paused skillfully for the laugh. “The little Hagada, with its awkward English and quaint old woodcuts, has been a revelation to me. I’ve suddenly realized, all over again, that I’m part of a tradition and culture that go back four thousand years. I’ve realized that it was we Jews, after all, with the immortal story of the Exodus from Egypt, who gave the world the concept of the holiness of freedom

Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize—the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.

Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President’s. Some people had it, some didn’t. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was “grease.” Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.

He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room. The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.

There is no morality in world history. There are only tides of change borne on violence and death. The victors write the history, pass the judgments, and hang or shoot the losers. In truth history is an endless chain of hegemony shifts, based on the decay of old political structures and the rise of new ones. Wars are the fever crises of those shifts. Wars are inevitable; there will always be wars; and the one war crime is to lose. That is the reality, and the rest is sentimental nonsense.

... God knows I pity the Dresden women and children whose charred bodies are propped up in Goebell's propaganda photographs , but nobody made the Germans follow Hitler . He wasn't a legitimate ruler . He was a man with a mouth , and they liked what he said . They got behind him and they let loose a firestorm that's sucking all the decent instincts out of human society . My peerless son died fighting it . It made savages of all of us . Hitler gloried in savagery , he proclaimed it as his battle cry , and the Germans shouted Sieg Heill ! They still go on laying down their misguided lives for him , and the lives of their unfortunate families . I wish them joy of their Fuhrer while he lasts .

By keeping back the twenty-five squadrons from the lost Battle of France, he acted toughly, wisely, and ungallantly; and he turned the war to the course that ended five long years later, when Hitler killed himself and Nazi Germany fell apart. This deed put Winston Churchill in the company of the rare saviors of countries, and perhaps of civilizations.

The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism." [...] "I’m sorry. I’m impressed with Hitler’s ability to use socialist prattle when necessary, and then discard it. He uses doctrines as he uses money, to get things done. They’re expendable. He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism, just as Lenin used utopian Marxism because it appealed to Russia’s messianic streak. Hitler means to hammer out a united Europe.... He understands them, and he may just succeed. A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time.

This game still had its old ritual fascination for Pug; he was following it tensely, smoking a cigar. Once his nostalgia had been keen for the tough youthful combat on the grass, the slamming of bodies, the tricky well-drilled plays, above all for the rare moments of breaking free and sprinting down the field, dodging one man and another with the stands around him a roaring sea of voices. Nothing in his life had since been quite like it. But long ago that nostalgia had departed; those grooves of memory had worn out. To think that lads much younger than his own two sons were out on that chilly field in Philadelphia now, made Victor Henry feel that he had led a very long, multilayered existence, and was now almost a living mummy. “Pug!

If you want to know, what I’ve studied seems to me a lot of rubbish. The rules, the lingo, strike me as comical. The idea of men spending their lives in this make-believe appalls me. I used to think it was preferable to the Army, but I’m sure now that they’re both the same kind of foolishness. I don’t care. I picked the Navy. I’ll see this stupid war through in the Navy.

There was no clear-cut moment of victory for the British. They really won when Sea Lion was called off, but this Hitler backdown was a secret. The Luftwaffe kept up heavy night raids on the cities, and this with the U-boat sinkings made the outlook for England darker and darker until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. But the Luftwaffe never recovered from the Battle of Britain. This was one reason why the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. The blitzkrieg ran out of blitz in Russia because it had dropped too much of it on the fields of Kent and Surrey, and in the streets of London.—V.H.

The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism.

Judd sighed. "I don't know why people take criticism so seriously. One good creator is worth all the critics who ever lived." "Criticism is necessary to literature," Hawke said, and felt a fierce disgust with himself. It was as though he were trying to soothe a homicidal lunatic. Judd said, "Nonsense, criticism is a minor form of entertainment, a sort of piggy-back writing that rides on other men's work.

Such are the stories that Bronka Ginsberg tells Jastrow while toiling up the mountain trail. “Sidor Nikonov is really not a bad man, for a goy,” she sums up, sighing. “Not a wild beast like some. But my grandfather was a rabbi in Bryansk. My father was the president of the Zhitomir Zionists. And look at me, will you? A forest wife. Ivan Ivanovitch’s whore.” Jastrow says, “You are an aishess khayil.” Bronka, ahead of him on the trail, looks back at him, her weatherbeaten face coloring, her eyes moist. Aishess khayil, from the Book of Proverbs, means “woman of valor,” the ultimate religious praise for a Jewess. Late

she had had nightmares of being pursued through Berlin by storm troopers. But it had never seemed quite real to her that somewhere on the face of the solid green earth human beings were doing to other human beings what the papers said the Nazis were doing to the Jews. She hoped that in the end the atrocities would turn out to be mostly newspaper talk, like the World War stories of the Huns eating Belgian babies. Her conscience had pricked her from time to time into giving part of her savings to refugee organizations. Beyond that, her mind was closed to the Nazis. She said uneasily, “You know, I’m ashamed of myself.

They could take a religion apart and show how it ticked, but they couldn’t put it back together so it would work for anybody. I mildly suggested that the day was past, maybe, when religion could work for any educated person. She flared a bit; said religion still worked for a hell of a lot of people. She said her parents would never have survived the death of Seth without it, and that she didn’t know whether she and Milton could have stayed in one piece after the baby died if they hadn’t had their religion. At this point I was probing, perhaps cruelly, to strike bottom. I said, “Well, Margie, maybe that only proves the power of a dream.” Like a flash she answered—and her voice sounded just as it did in the old days, full of life and sparkle, “Who isn’t dreaming, Wally? You?” The fireworks started around then, all green and golden and red, over the sound.

Shirley doesn’t play fair, you see. What she wants is what a woman should want, always has and always will—big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs—but she’ll never say so. Because in our time those things are supposed to be stuffy and dull. She knows that. She reads novels. So, half believing what she says, she’ll tell you the hell with that domestic dullness, never for her. She’s going to paint, that’s what—or be a social worker, or a psychiatrist, or an interior decorator, or an actress, always an actress if she’s got any real looks—but the idea is she’s going to be somebody. Not just a wife. Perish the thought! She’s Lady Brett Ashley, with witty devil-may-care whimsey and shocking looseness all over the place.

Lord, how the British have been asking for this! An alliance with Russia was their one chance to stop Germany. They had years in which to do it. All of Stalin’s fear of Germany and the Nazis was on their side. And what did they do? Dawdle, fuss, flirt with Hitler, and give away Czechoslovakia. Finally, finally, they sent some minor politicians on a slow boat to see Stalin. When Hitler decided to gamble on this alliance, he shot his foreign minister to Moscow on a special plane, with powers to sign a deal. And that’s why we’re within inches of a world war.

Well, most of you are pretty new to the Caine. It’s a broken-down obsolete ship. It steamed through four years of war. It has no unit citation and it achieved nothing spectacular. It was supposed to be a mine-sweeper, but in the whole war it swept six mines. It did every kind of menial fleet duty, mostly several hundred thousand miles of dull escorting. Now it’s a damaged hulk and will probably be broken up. Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives—if you don’t think so now you will later on, more and more. We were all doing part of what had to be done to keep our country existing, not any better than before, just the same old country that we love. We’re all landlubbers who pitted our lives and brains against the sea and the enemy, and did what we were told to do. The hours we spent on the Caine were hours of glory. They are all over. We’ll scatter into the trains and busses now and most of us will go home. But we will remember the Caine, the old ship in which we helped to win the war. Caine duty is the kind of duty that counts. The high-powered stuff just sets the date and place of the victory won by the Caine. “Lower the flag.

tell you. Fun is worth having. And love. And beauty. And travel. And success—My God, there is so much worth having, Dad!” It felt very queer to be talking to her father about herself in earnest, as though he were Noel Airman or Marsha Zelenko. It was like blurting confidences to a new friend whom she wasn’t sure she could trust. But she was enjoying it. “The finest foods are worth having, the finest wines, the loveliest places, the best music, the best books, the best art. Amounting to something. Being well known, being myself, being distinguished, being important, using all my abilities, instead of becoming just one more of the millions of human cows! Children,

His identity as a naval officer is the essential balancing factor. It’s the key to his personal security and therefore he’s excessively zealous to protect his standing. That would account for the harshness and ill temper I spoke about before.” “Would he be disinclined to admit to mistakes?” “Well, there’s a tendency that way. The commander has a fixed anxiety about protecting his standing. Of course there’s nothing unbalanced in that.” “Would he be a perfectionist?” “Such a personality would be.” “Inclined to hound subordinates about small details?” “He prides himself on meticulousness. Any mistake of a subordinate is intolerable because it might endanger him.” “Is such a personality, with such a zeal for perfection, likely to avoid all mistakes?” “Well, we all know that reality is beyond the hundred-per-cent control of any human being—” “Yet he will not admit mistakes when made. Is he lying?” “Definitely not! He—you might say he revises reality in his own mind so that he comes out blameless. There’s a tendency to blame others—

The glory of Manhattan which Willie had seen from the airplane was nowhere visible at Broadway and Fiftieth Street when he came up out of the subway. It was the same old dirty crowded corner: here a cigar store, there an orange-drink stand, yonder a flickering movie marquee, everywhere people with ugly tired faces hurrying in a bitter wind that whirled flapping newspapers and little spirals of dry snow along the gutters. It was all as familiar to Willie as his hand. The reception room of the Sono-phono Studios, some seven feet square, consisted of plasterboard walls, a plasterboard door in back, a green metal desk, and a very ugly receptionist with a plasterboard complexion, chewing a large wad of pink gum. “Yeah? What can I do for you?

In a solemn tone, like a priest chanting a mass, beating time in the air with a stiff finger, Slote quoted: " 'The German Revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the Critique of Kant, by the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte.  These doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces  that only await their time to break forth.  Christianity subdued the brutal warrior passion of the Germans, but it could not quench it. When the Cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then  will break forth again the frantic Berserker rage.  The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries.  Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.' " Slote made an awkward, weak gesture with a fist to represent a hammerblow, and went on: " 'Smile not at the dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and the other philosophers.  Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect.  The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder.  German thunder is of true German character.  It is not very nimble but rumbles along somewhat slowly.  But come it will. And when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen.' "Heine - the Jew who composed the greatest German poetry, and who fell in love with German philosophy - Heine wrote that," Slote said in a quieter tone. "He wrote that a hundred and six years ago.

To sum up, then, we are Israelites, descended from the small nation which came out of the Sinai desert into Canaan three thousand years ago, with a tradition of liberation from Egypt, under a lawgiver and deliverer named Moses. We are called Jews, and our heritage Judaism, because in the political decline and fall of our nation the tribe which held out longest and became the surviving remnant in exile predicted by the Torah was named Judah. Almost all living Jews stem, at a remove of no more than four or five generations at the most, from observant Jews. Historically, Israelites who have discontinued the practice of the law of Moses have faded into the environment and lost their identity within a century or two. The attrition over the centuries has of course been enormous. The Jews who are left are mainly the sons and grandsons of those who have kept the faith, preserving the chain unbroken through time, from the twentieth century back to the sunrise of the human intelligence. Before examining this faith, we can surely acknowledge two things: first, that as a feat of gallantry of the spirit of man, the preservation of Judaism ranks high; second, that if ancient lineage be a source of legitimate pride, the Jews have a right to be a proud people.