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This life is slow suicide, unless you read.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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He’s too clever to be wise, if that makes any sense. Very
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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The trouble started one morning when there was a fog.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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You can't assume a goddamned thing in this Navy.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Can’t stop a Nazi with a lawbook.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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the one loophole that military wisdom can never quite button up—the sympathy of the downtrodden for each other.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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no man who rises to command of a United States naval ship can possibly be a coward. And
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Sex takes up a very small part of the day, anyway.” “It makes the rest of the day worth living.” “You
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Cabs, cabs! Why did God give you feet? Walk me to Fiftieth.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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I almost died, and I realized that all I regretted was you.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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don’t make the mistake of skipping the Old Testament. It’s the core of all religion, I
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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The Caine was a pile of junk in the last hours of decay, manned by hoodlums.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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I think appreciating Dickens goes with ten thousand in the bank.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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This life is slow suicide, unless you read.” “Roland
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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You’re not supposed to love Jews necessarily, just to give them a fair shake.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Duce, damn your whipped-cream soul, do you know anything that can clear up this crazy mess?
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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We transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs who
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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This country of ours consists of pioneers, after
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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They were invited to fine homes and exclusive clubs. It was a great war.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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The Kwajalein invasion, the first of these,
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Oaths, blasphemies, and one recurring four-letter word filled the air like fog.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Not that I really think the Caine is inanimate. It’s an iron poltergeist sent into the world by God
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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None of the authorities have experienced the worst of enough typhoons to make airtight generalizations. None of the authorities, moreover, are anxious to acquire the experience. The
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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When you’re at the bottom, there’s no place to go but up,” said
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Could be,” said Horrible “Chief Budge had ’em scraping bilges in number-two engine room. I told him there wasn’t nothin’ keepin’ the water out but that rust.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Well, normality, you know, is a fiction in psychiatry. It’s all relative. No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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?
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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—
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Harry Tugend had abandoned radio to write films; Allen’s writers were now Arnold Auerbach and Herman Wouk (later famous as the author of The Caine Mutiny and other bestselling novels). Wouk and Auerbach may have been the most rewritten team in radio, for Allen continued to do the script’s final drafts.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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named False Witness the fourth-best legal thriller ever written.” “After what?” “Anatomy of a Murder , The Caine Mutiny , and Presumed Innocent.
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Greg Iles (The Quiet Game (Penn Cage, #1))
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Another day and another passed of rough seas and lowering skies; of rolling and pitching, cold winds, and cold damp eating into bones softened by tropic warmth; of a treadmill of watches in a wheelhouse dank and gloomy by day and danker and gloomier by night; of sullen silent sailors and pale dog-tired officers, of meals in the wardroom eaten in silence, with the captain at the head of the table ceaselessly rolling the balls in his fingers and saying nothing except an infrequent grumpy sentence about the progress of the work requests. Willie lost track of time. He stumbled from the bridge to his coding, from coding to correcting publications, from corrections back up to the bridge, from the bridge to the table for an unappetizing bolted meal, from the table to the clipping shack for sleep which never went uninterrupted for more than a couple of hours. The world became narrowed to a wobbling iron shell on a waste of foamy gray, and the business of the world was staring out at empty water or making red-ink insertions in the devil’s own endless library of mildewed unintelligible volumes.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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?
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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I dreamed of becoming an elite White House Secret Service officer, a member of its Uniformed Division. Nothing more—and certainly nothing less. My dream came true. I stood guard, a pistol at my hip, outside the Oval Office, the last barrier before anyone saw Bill Clinton. The last barrier before Monica Lewinsky saw Bill Clinton. Yes, I’m that Secret Service officer. I saw Monica, and I saw a lot more. I saw Hillary, too. I witnessed her obscenity-laced tirades, her shifting of blame, how she berated Vince Foster until he could stand no more, how minor incidents involving blue gloves and botched invitations sent her into a tizzy. It was like watching Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny obsessing about a quart of missing strawberries—and losing sight of the world war raging about him. I saw Hillary scheming with Dick Morris to undermine White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. FBI agents confided in me about her emerging Filegate scandal; they were just as frustrated with Hillary’s methods as we were. Life at the Clinton White House careened from crisis (manufactured or not) to even greater crisis, the participants often unable to catch their breath and certainly incapable of learning from them. The Clinton White House atmosphere alternated from hilarity to bitter anger, lurching from nerves-on-end tension to sheer boredom, its most important residents painfully trapped between illusion and reality.
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Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
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What is his basic premise? That everyone on the Caine is a liar, a traitor, and a funk-off, so that the ship can only function if he constantly nags and spies and threatens and screeches and hands out draconic punishments. Now, how do you go about proving that his premise is wrong?” “You
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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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.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)
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Remember this, if you can—there is nothing, nothing more precious than time.
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Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny)