Quotes from Herman Wouk

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.

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.

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

an outstanding engineer, an

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

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

If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.

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

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

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.

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

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

screws on the cowlings. Only a divine miracle

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

usurpation.

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.

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

Al nations celebrate the day of their coming into being with a work stoppage and ceremonies. The Jews, who believe that God created the universe, celebrate its coming into being, and give thanks to its Maker, once a week.

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.

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.

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.

Now I'm not a Nazi, I've never said the Führer is a thousand percent right. But he's a winner, damn it all. He gets things done, like Roosevelt. And you want us to get rid of him?

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.

The last war ruined Germany. Another war will be the absolute end of our country.