Cold Turkey (2004)
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
[…] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Fancy in Nubibus
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
On his time—1967 and '68—with the Taiyo Whales; as quoted in "The Summer of 66" by Rick Shrum, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 20, 1998), p. D-3
Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)
Context: The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the "ticking time bomb" situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure.
Stefan Aust, Terrorism in Germany: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon http://www.ghi-dc.org/files/publications/bulletin/bu043/45.pdf
“The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 386.
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of death
Rode the six hundred.
St. 2
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854)
