War By Timetable Quotes

Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion.

A song of despair The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the dwarves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness. and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief my desire was to you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash. The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare... The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.

The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven't stopped being surprised. The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it's almost impossible to define victory. You can't document the war's progress on a world map or chart it on a historical timetable in a way that makes any sense. A country used to a feeling of being in command and control has been whipsawed into a state of perpetual reaction, swinging wildly between passive fear and fevered, often thoughtless, activity, at a high cost to its self-confidence.

At the precise moment set out in the timetable, Meghan arrived at the chapel in a Rolls-Royce, the same vehicle that had carried Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee and the Duke of Windsor’s wife, to her husband’s funeral in 1972. The official’s choice was deliberate. As she stepped out of the limousine, Meghan’s bridal train was caught. The escorting officer who opened the door offered no help. The explanation foreshadowed what was to come. After her rudeness during the rehearsal the previous day, explained an officer, no one had any feelings of goodwill towards the bride.

I would not call it a writer's block. A writer's block to me is a temporary thing. A month, you know, six weeks. This was more a writer's blockade. To me, this was very much like the Vietnam War. It was the same timetable, it was on the same schedule as the Vietnam War. I don't know how I got into it and I couldn't get out of it.

All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions. It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro’s freedom. It is disappointment with a federal administration that seems to be more concerned about winning an ill-considered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home. It is disappointment with white legislators who pass laws on behalf of Negro rights that they never intended to implement. It is disappointment with the Christian church that appears to be more white than Christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained-glass windows.

As Churchill predicted, the full might and fury of the Nazis were turned on Britain. The dreaded massive bombing of the Luftwaffe, which had terrorized other nations into surrender, failed to break the British. Hitler was stopped for the first time. Britain, though lacking the military forces to launch a major counter-attack, nevertheless stalled the Nazi timetable of conquest, thus buying time, not only for itself but also for an almost completely disarmed United States to begin preparing itself militarily for the ordeal ahead. Many nations, forces, and events contributed to the final victory over Germany and Japan. But what made it all possible was that Britain withstood the fire and blast of war and refused to surrender, even when the situation looked hopeless. It was indeed their finest hour. Freedom survives in the world today because of it.

EVERYONE WAS exhausted from working such long hours. Groves called for speed, not perfection. Phil Morrison was told that “a date near August tenth was a mysterious final date which we, who had the technical job of readying the bomb, had to meet at whatever cost in risk or money or good development policy.” (Stalin was expected to enter the Pacific War no later than August 15.) Oppenheimer recalled, “I did suggest to General Groves some changes in the bomb design which would have made more efficient use of the material. . . . He turned them down as jeopardizing the promptness of availability of these bombs.” Groves’ timetable was driven by President Truman’s scheduled meeting with Stalin and Churchill in Potsdam in mid-July. Oppenheimer later testified at his security hearing, “I believe we were under incredible pressure to get it done before the Potsdam meeting and Groves and I bickered for a couple of days.

In his 1999 book, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, Robert B. Stinnett, a navy photographer who served in the same World War II aerial group as former President George H. W. Bush, used documents acquired from a Freedom of Information Act request to demonstrate definitively that FDR knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and let it go as part of his larger strategy to provoke the Japanese into war.185 The smoking guns included several declassified, U.S.-decoded Japanese naval broadcasts, and spy communiqués which set forth a timetable, a census, and bombing plans for U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor, at least the contents of which were relayed to FDR and his aides.186 In large part, the book discussed a particularly damning piece of evidence called the McCollum Memo, a six-page document written in October 1940—fourteen months before the attack on Pearl Harbor—and addressed to two senior FDR military advisors outlining the steps for provoking the Japanese into making an overt act of war.187

There are four warring interests in spaceflight: ambitiousness of vision, urgency of timetable, reduction of cost, and safety to astronauts. These can never be entirely reconciled. In the sixties, urgency and ambitiousness were the driving factors, and because this was understood and accepted, the massive cost and risk were accepted as well. We now seem to be at a moment when reduction of cost is paramount, with safety coming in a very close second. This being the case, we should not be surprised that ambitiousness and urgency have had to be set aside altogether. But it’s ludicrous to claim, as I often hear people do, that “NASA has lost its vision.” NASA has lost support, not vision. Wernher

Timetable of Events Relating to the Trojan War *All dates are approximate.

It’s tempting to turn Clarke into a caricature or intellectual straw man: an easy grab in an attempt to show the ridiculous sexism inherent in Victorian ideology. Nevertheless, his theories became pervasive in American thought and defined expectations about access to wilderness for generations. Multiple outdoor organizations prohibited female membership, for example, including the influential hiking group the White Mountain Club. The club’s founder, John M. Gould, was a bank clerk and amateur Civil War historian. In his How to Camp Out, first published in 1877, Gould advised young men to view their expeditions as regimental exercises: hikes were best considered “marches”; male camping pals were instructed to form “companies” with clear duties and timetables. Most marches, he warned, would be too difficult for ladies, particularly if routes included loose rocks or tangles of low-growing trees. And because women ought not stray far from home, sites where they might camp must be chosen accordingly. Any overnight locations should be such that stoves could be delivered to make women more comfortable, along with discarded doors that women could stand upon while dressing. Sleeping outside was out of the question during any kind of precipitation; instead, schoolhouses or sawmills should be located as shelter.

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash.

It is important to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future.

I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails.

The Germans drew up elaborate plans for moving Italian forces to the French front, and the Italians enjoyed this planning greatly.

This argument is not supported by the evidence. As indicated by their earlier mobilisations (especially Russia’s), in 1914 France and Russia were far more eager to fight than was Germany – and far, far more than Austria-Hungary, if in her case we mean fighting Russia, not Serbia. Germany declared war first on France and Russia because of Bethmann’s misguided sense of legal propriety, but she mobilised last, and even then hesitatingly, with her leaders (except for the timetable-obsessed Moltke and Falkenhayn) clutching desperately for exits, as indicated by how eagerly the kaiser, Bethmann, and Jagow jumped on Grey’s last-minute neutrality offers.