Quotes from Winston Groom

In life's steeplechases, one must always jump the fences when they come.

He had been, and in some respects always would be, a defender of established order. Imperialism would never be a pejorative for [Churchill]," Manchester observed.

Lindbergh knew perfectly well what modern bombs could do to cities but, seeing Nazi Germany for the first time, the idea of a new and very dangerous war became real to him.

One GI quipped (after Churchill) that "Never in the field of human conflict have so few been commanded by so many, from so far away.

Germany," Lindbergh said, "had the ambitious drive of America, but that drive was headed for war.

Whereas the rulers of Germany in 1914 and her allies who provoked World War I were—to use the term in its most generous sense—at least "gentlemen," the leaders of the Axis powers in 1941 were thugs. They were, most of them, amoral murderers and brutish torturers who gained power through assassination and corruption, and more than sixty years after the fact this remains a stubborn truth.

You frighten me, Mr. Reed," Bierce said. "Why is that?" "Because according to your creed, you'd be willing to tear up the Constitution of the United States." "It's a piece of paper," Reed said. "A good one, mind you," he added. "But a piece of paper nonetheless. Times

Stalin's opinion on the subject boiled down to this: "Education is a dangerous weapon, whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands, and at whom it is aimed.

change. Ideas change.

With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at the altar of science, a fallacy, if not a heresy, that could lead to the undoing of the American spirit.

Lindbergh expressed these thoughts in a splendid speech while accepting the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy at the Washington Aero Club in January 1946. Titling his speech "Honoring the Wright Brothers," he took as his theme "the way in which science was divorcing man from his old sense of independence and moral values."16

By 1938 much of the New Deal was dead. The programs that were not killed by the Supreme Court had been killed by Congress, which had seen the election of a significant number of conservatives.

Stalin believed all of his life, were a sign of weakness. If the people only pushed harder, the government would collapse and socialism would prevail.

Americans have seen fit to elect twelve generals to the U.S. presidency, but even before there was a United States of America generals ruled the earth. Take

As we will see in the following pages, peacetime is not always kind to generals and they do not necessarily do well outside their task of generaling. Perhaps that is because during war they become as close to gods on earth as we are ever likely to see. Patton

The trials continued week after week, until nearly all the old Bolsheviks who had formed the party during and after the October Revolution had been liquidated. In fact, of the nearly two thousand delegates to the 1934 party congress, half were arrested and many sent to the firing squad. The military fared no better. Three out of five field marshals were arrested, tried, and executed, as well as thousands of lesser grade officers.

In late 1915 there appeared on the Western Front a German flier named Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, after his royal title and a penchant for painting his squadron's Fokker triwing fighters red. He was a natural born killer who shot down more than eighty enemy aircraft before himself being fatally brought down by ground fire

It took Congress less than an hour to vote unanimously for war on Japan—except for one nay vote by the longtime Montana pacifist Jeannette Rankin, who had also voted against entering World War I.

Stalin underlined a passage in his copy of Marx that he kept in his library: "There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new: revolutionary terror." Beside it, Stalin wrote: "Terror is the quickest way to the new society.

Arthur had begun to understand with devastating clarity that the most valuable thing a human can do is commit to another human, or humans---in this case, his family.

After seventeen days of flying school he could now call himself a pilot. After putting in twenty-five hours of flying time, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army. W

It was one of the bloodiest battles in history, and one of the most historic. Kursk is generally viewed as the turning point in the Second World War in Europe, for the Germans never again launched a successful offensive.

It has been estimated that for the next twenty years an average of a million Russian people a year were executed by the Communist regime, which, for much of that time, would be headed by the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Joseph V. Stalin.29

Tennessee to places like Corinth, Nashville, and even Shiloh, which at that point he'd never heard of.