Category: Verbatim

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over — indeed before it really began — and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history.

— David Halberstam (1934-2007), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

… the American government did not want to face the consequences of peace. It was, after all, one thing to wish for an end to the war and quite another to confront the issues upon which the war had begun. President Johnson had wanted to end the war; so, too, had President Kennedy. But to end the war and not to lose it: the distinction was crucial, and particularly crucial after all the American lives that had been spent and all the political rhetoric expended.

— Frances Fitzgerald (1940- ), from Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam, 1972.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing on the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. They believe in the future as if it were a religion; they believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish, that solutions wait somewhere for all problems, like brides.

— Frances Fitzgerald (1940- ), American journalist, author

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgets to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

— Karl Marx (1818-1893), German journalist, founder of Communism

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings, to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually.

— Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001), American philosopher, educator

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.

— Mariah Carey (1970- ), American singer, songwriter, record producer, music video director and actress