Category: Verbatim

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of today.

— Party declaration of the Progressive Party of America, 1924

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Supposing a man-hater had desired to render the human race as unhappy as possible, what could he have invented for the purpose better than belief in an incomprehensible being about whom men could never be able to agree?

— Denis Diderot (1713-1784), French philosopher

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

At times, the comradeship that was the [Vietnam] war’s only redeeming quality caused some of its worst crimes — acts of retribution for friends who had been killed. Some men could not withstand the stress of guerilla fighting: the hair-trigger alertness constantly demanded of them, the feeling that the enemy was everywhere, the inability to distiguish civilians from combatants created emotional pressure which built to such a point that a trivial provocation could make these men explode with the blind destructiveness of a mortar shell.

— Philip Caputo, “Rumor of War”