Quotes from Thomas E. Ricks

Fidel Castro disclosed that he was reading Churchill's World War II memoirs. "If Churchill hadn't done what he did to defeat the Nazis, you wouldn't be here, none of us would be here," he told a crowd that had gathered to see the new Cuban leader when he visited a Havana bookstore. "What is more, we have to take a special interest in him because he, too, led a little island against a great enemy." Another surprising fan

Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.

If there is anything we can take away from them, it is the wisdom of employing this two-step process, especially in times of mind-bending crisis: Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.

Indeed, it was a skill Washington had acquired rather painfully in his two wars. In leading combat operations, slow and steady thinking, followed with energetic execution, often is more effective than a series of hasty moves that tend to exhaust a force and expose it to attack. One

As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , "You pays your money and you makes your choice!" That may be the most American sentence ever written.

For the Revolutionary generation, silent virtue almost always would be valued more than loud eloquence.

the platoon moves out to the rifle range barracks for basic rifle training . The gospel according to Parris Island is that shooting accurately is a matter of discipline: Even the clumsiest recruit can do it well if he follows the prescribed steps, from sighting and aiming, to proper positioning, to trigger control and sight adjustment. "Any person in the world can be a marksman if he applies himself

The natural state of man is war. I think that peace is an interval for preparation." The novel is significant because

And what voices! A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness & richness combined with a fundamental ill-will—people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful.

C. P. Snow, the son of a church organist, recalled in 1940 being reassured by listening to Churchill. "He was an aristocrat, but he would cheerfully have beggared his class and friends, and everyone else too, if that was the price of the country coming through. We believed it of him. The poor believed it, as his voice rolled out into the slum streets, those summer evenings of 1940.

Any Marine veteran can reach back thirty or forty years and summon the names of his drill instructors. Flying in a Marine jet over Parris Island, Brig. Gen. Randy West looks down on the swampy land and simply says , "I was born there.

If there is one thing a reader should take away from this book, it is that there is little certain about our nation except that it remains an experiment that requires our serious and sustained attention to thrive.

In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It is thinking and doing.

One of the more powerful commentaries on America was the arch question Samuel Johnson posed in 1777: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"4 It is a question that still hangs in the air more than two centuries later.

What was most important and really new about the Age of Reason was the sublime confidence of the intellectuals and societal leaders in the power of man's reason

In a letter to President Madison mainly about his sheep Jefferson concluded with a quotation from Horace's very Epicurean sixth epistle: Vive, vale, et siquid novisti rectius istis Candidus imperti sinon, his ulere mecum.73 That is, in the translation of the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart, "Live: be happy. If you know of any thing preferable to these maxims, candidly communicate it: if not, with me make use of these.

Jefferson was notably ambivalent about the French philosopher. "In the science of government Montesquieu's spirit of laws is generally recommended. It contains indeed a great number of political truths; but almost an equal number of political heresies: so that the reader must be constantly on his guard.

Jefferson did not detail his objections, but he likely was irked by Montesquieu's conclusion that a major cause of Rome's decline was Epicurean thought.

We do not call ourselves 'Native American,' because our blood and people were here long before this land was called the Americas. We are older than America can ever be and do not know the borders.

On December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own party's government, stepped out of a taxi on New York's Fifth Avenue.

More than anything else, I have learned in researching this book that America is a moving target, a goal that must always be pursued but never quite reached.

Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain at the time, provides an illuminating contrast to Orwell. He was as politically naive as Orwell was observant, in part because his macho posing got in the way of seeing accurately.

Overall, Zinni's rules read like an updating of how to apply the Marine Corps culture to today's conflicts: Stay loose. Stay focused. Keep it simple. And be honest.

Ask an American soldier to identify himself, and he probably will say he is "in the Army." By contrast, a Marine— especially if he is one of the better ones— is likely to say, "I'm a Marine." The small linguistic difference is significant: The first is a matter of membership or occupation; the second speaks to identity.