Quotes from Paul Dickson

A businessman needs three umbrellas - one to leave at the office, one to leave at home, and one to leave on the train.

Allen's Law of Civilization: It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.

Airplane Law, The: When the plane you are on is late, the plane you want to transfer to is on time.

Abrams's Advice: When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.

No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.

INFRACANINOPHILE. One who habitually champions the underdog. The creation of American writer Christopher Morley (1890–1957).

Of the first million men screened by draft boards in 1940, at least 130,000 were rejected for severe disabilities relating to malnutrition.

Brian's Law. The longer you wait to write a thank-you note, the longer it must be.

the Army saw slang as a morale builder no matter how cynical it became.

One defense expert, writing for the International News Service, noted that the final cost of bringing a soldier into the 1941 maneuvers, over and above the cost of keeping that same man in camp for the same amount of time, was approximately $ 22. He added: "That's probably the cheapest cost there has ever been for turning camp soldiers into field soldiers. And it's field soldiers that you fight wars with." 33

The importance of Marshall's pre–Pearl Harbor leadership is impossible to ignore. To cite one dynamic example, fully three-quarters (more than 45,000) of the Army's lieutenants and captains who fought in all theaters of World War II were graduates of the Officer Candidate Schools he fought so hard to establish before the United States entered the war, in the face of strong opposition from both Roosevelt and Stimson.

Undeniably, the bold actions of Patton and his tankers in Europe had been developed and rehearsed in the United States. Dubbing his desert training center "Little Libya" allowed him to turn metaphor into reality, when he drove his troops 1,200 miles across Libya to Tripoli, which he entered in January 1943.

MONDEGREEN. A term for misheard song lyrics, coined by American freelance writer Sylvia Wright (1920–1961) in 1954. It derived from her long-held belief that a song contained the line, "They had slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen." In fact, the line ended with the words, "and laid him on the green.

Without question, however, the single most important hardware innovation to make its debut in the 1941 maneuvers was the portable runway dubbed the Marston Mat.

PLENTIETH. Franklin P. Adams's adjective of indefinite older age, as in: "He is about to celebrate his plentieth birthday.

May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.