Quotes from Herman Wouk

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The trouble started one morning when there was a fog.

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.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read." "Roland

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

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.

It's a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They're hobbled by their paper shufflers, like all politicians. More so, in a way.

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

assailing her. Were they doing the

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

There are good and bad things in all political systems.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

dithyramb coming to majestic life: a swarm of fresh seapower