Quotes from James Webb

Ghosts walked beside Condley on the muddy trails, dirty and unshaven, burdened by helmets and packs and weapons, loping tiredly, all parts of their bodies half asleep while their eyes stayed bright with fear. The ghosts would always be there, young-faced and yearning, even as time itself erased the evidence of their passing. It was a burden rather than a talent that Condley could walk a village trail and be in two time zones at once, the past just as fresh as today.

Courage and honor, respect and even pity, justice and, yes, you may not like for me to say it, but let me use the word - love? Do you know these words, Mahn? A love for your children, so deep that you would die for them? Or maybe a love of justice, so pure that it demands that you speak out? These are the feelings that push the world forward.

Well, what kind of hello is that? Besides. You wouldn't want me as a supply officer, Bagger. I'd fuck it up so bad you'd starve.

Philadelphia became the Ulster Scots' most popular port of entry for two reasons. The first was that the Pennsylvania colony had been created with an eye toward accommodating religious freedom and thus largely welcomed the Ulster dissenters , at least initially. And the second— equally as important—was that the communities in New England and New York wanted nothing to do with them.

both tariff rates and domestic charges for the use of railroad freight blatantly discriminated against the South, impeding its ability to grow and compete. The rates charged for shipping goods along the nation's railways had for decades been rigged to protect Northern markets from Southern goods.

To them, joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else's collectivist judgment makes about as much sense as

In a nutshell, over the decades the national policies of the Republicans had raped the region while the actions of many state and local Democrats too often were designed to preserve the assets of a select few at the expense of just about everyone else.

Until they became the British Empire's greatest voyagers, indeed its greatest export, settling in odd places all around the world. And for that splinter of them that became my people, the Scots-Irish, this meant the Appalachian Mountains, their first stop on their way to creating a way of life that many would come to call, if not American, certainly the defining fabric of the South and the Midwest as well as the core character of the nation's working class.

Their bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and then in the bitter settlements of England's Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland.

They fought the Indians and then they fought the British, comprising 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army. They were the great pioneers— Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and Davy Crockett among them— blazing the westward trails into Kentucky , Ohio, Tennessee, and beyond, where other Scots-Irishmen like Kit Carson picked up the slack.

Up till the Age of Reason, the collection of beliefs which modern occultists have used as a quarrying-ground can be shown to have had a certain consistency. this consistency is a mystical-philosophical-religious approach deriving from the religions displaced by Christianity. This approach remains the nucleus of occult Tradition.

Change the fabric of their culture? It hasn't happened yet, not in two thousand years. And it won't happen now.

Benjamin Franklin had predicted as much nearly a century before, commenting that with the introduction of slavery, "the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain'd 100."57

Mud brothers, he thought. Sharers of a truth that could never be defined by the labels that had been created by outsiders. After all, what tiny fraction of America had ever even seen that nasty, vicious corner of the war, that corridor of terror and sorry that had so devoured the few who had?

The blood feuds of today's Ulster— and their legacy in the journey of America's Scots-Irish— have their roots in a decision made in 1610 by King James I of England, who also reigned as James VI of Scotland, to form a Protestant plantation on Irish soil.

Government requires motion, perhaps even more than wisdom. And there is a constant temptation to depend on those who know how to keep it moving, rather than demanding that it stay on any particular course.

Entrenched aristocracies, however we may want to define them, do not want change; their desire instead is to manage dissent in a way that does not disrupt their control. But over time, under the right system of government, a free, thinking people has the energy and ultimately the power to effect change.

The complicated formula that allowed these purchases included their assistance in obtaining Con O'Neill's pardon, his release from prison, and, oddly, a knighthood for O'Neill balanced by a pledge from the two lairds to King James that the land would be "planted with British Protestants." 6 Almost immediately, Montgomery and Hamilton began arranging the migration of large numbers of lowland Scots into their Ulster lands.

We been abandoned, Lieutenant. We been kicked off the edge of the goddamn cliff. They don't know how to fight it, and they don't know how to stop fighting it.

it represents a large, independent swing vote—whose key concerns are seldom passionately represented by either side in any election—rather than a force that affirmatively shapes the national agenda.

Finally, in August 1607, the cream of Ulster's Irish aristocracy, including Hugh O'Neill himself, left Ireland for permanent exile. Other Irish were to follow these hundred or so key leaders until by 1614 "there were 300 Irish students and 3,000 Irish soldiers in Spanish territories alone.

Vietnam War was, to say the obvious, deeply controversial. One of its main dividing lines was whether a young American would step forward to serve or under what conditions he would find a way to stay here at home. It is beyond debate that many who opposed both the war and military service doubled down on their dissent by denigrating the value of serving and the morality of those who did the hardest fighting in the war.

And there was another memorable lesson. Such is the power of the written word that the works of a single thoughtful writer—and indeed sometimes just one powerful book—might focus the direction of a young person's life.