Quotes from Victor Davis Hanson

It proved almost impossible to square the circle of ensuring crew safety and comfort when trapped in a riveted or welded steel shell of stored gasoline, high-explosive shells and machine gun bullets, sparking engine plugs, and incoming projectiles.

When you're in war, you don't have to be perfect to be good, you just have to be 51% better than the enemy if you want a moral edge. We in the West have this Utopian idea that we have to be 99.9% good, and if we're not, then we're no damned good. And the enemy knows that.

Nor was combat fatal to most combatants; annihilation of entire armies was rare in the classical age, as the nearly uniform adoption of the panoply—the Greeks' bronze breastplate, shield, helmet, greaves, spear, and sword—ensured protection from repeated attacks.

Future generations will learn whether human nature has remained constant—and thus enemies who face only a temporary loss of freedom will prove more, not less, bloodthirsty against both soldier and civilian.

how putting global concerns above national interests insidiously erodes the financial health, freedoms, and safety of Americans. In blunter terms, when American elites feel their first concerns are with the world community abroad rather than with the interests of their own countrymen, there are consequences for American citizens.

hue, his combed-over

History also is mostly the story of noncitizenship.

Nicholas Monsarrat's epic postwar novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, is a quite different, nightmarish elemental story of men at sea amid

The twin pillars of the multicultural doctrine are "proportional representation" (hiring and admissions must reflect national demography) and "disparate impact" (intentional bias is automatically assumed and need not be proved for remediation). Because the former is not enforced systematically and the latter operates without proof of bias and prejudice, the result is the rise of "thought crimes" that must be addressed to ensure reparatory government action.

In 2020 nearly eight billion diverse peoples dress, listen, talk, travel, and communicate in an increasingly homogenous manner that mostly follows the examples of those in the United States, Europe, many of the English-speaking former colonies of the British Empire, and the Asian democracies of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.

the central problem with global elites remains a sort of retrograde tribalism. For all the grand talk of being citizens of the world, they really owe their limited allegiances only to like kind—westernized elites with proper credentials—or rather, to the systems and fonts of their wealth and success. They are like the royal families of Europe before World War I, incestuously related and essentially more akin to each other than to their constituents.

when we all went to the universities, when we abandoned what made us good & embraced what made us comfortable & secure, we lost something essential, knew we lost it & yet chose to lose.

The system rather than the man was what would win the war.

Thucydides's ancient warning that "it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire."16

In Kerr's mind, the toll of 373 deaths due to supposed US government laxity was the moral equivalent of 70 million deaths at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Had China been a small autocratic country without much financial clout, where the NBA occasionally played a demonstration game, Kerr might well never have spoken out in its defense. The catalyst for his candor was money and hope of more money, not principle.

The life of a farmer is increasingly Hobbesian—poor, nasty, and brutish, even if not always short. It has been my own experience that many who still rise to that challenge today are themselves hard-nosed, peculiar, dogmatic, and distasteful characters, better appreciated at a distance, myself perhaps included. My purposes in deviating somewhat from a 'professional' stance are threefold.

Rommel soon enjoyed almost mystical status among his Africa Korps troops, bringing to mind Virgil's famous comment on improbable achievement: "Possunt, quia posse videntur" ("They can, because they think they can," Aeneid 5.231).

States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking.

Entertainers wrongly assume that their fame, money, and influence arise from broad knowledge rather than natural talent, looks, or mastery of a narrow skill.

Behind every American soldier, dozens of their countrymen tonight sleep soundly — and hundreds more in their shadow abroad will wake up alive and safe.

Globalization has enriched the planet beyond belief, leading to ever-increased demands of perfection. And thanks to 24/7 communications, we all instantaneously know when these expectations aren't met.

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes — affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism — the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.