Much to the dismay of the Administration...

Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.

- Al Swearengen

Deadwood, "I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For"

Faithfulness he talked of, madam, your enduring faithfulness.

In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant.... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.

- Søren Kierkegaard

It bears repeating, having read the news

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

- C.S. Lewis

Stand back! They're going to try Science!

With the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents. Our knowledge of science has clearly outstripped our capacity to control it. We have many men of science, but too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death.

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. This is our twentieth century's claim to distinction and to progress.

- General Omar Bradley, November 10, 1948

The term "laws" lends them respect undue

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.

- Edmund Burke, Letter to Charles James Fox, Oct. 8, 1777

Read the future

I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars, laughed at the frightened
And forecast victory; never one moment's doubt.
But now not far, over the backs of some crawling years, the next
Great war's column of dust and fire writhes
Up the sides of the sky: it becomes clear that we too may suffer
What others have, the brutal horror of defeat—
Or if not in the next, then in the next—therefore watch Germany
And read the future. We wish, of course, that our women
Would die like biting rats in the cellars, our men like wolves on the mountain:
It will not be so. Our men will curse, cringe, obey;
Our women uncover themselves to the grinning victors for bits of chocolate.

Robinson Jeffers, We Are Those People (1948)

An infinitely-quotable man

A general of distinction, for whom I once had the honor of working, maintained that there were two transcendent experiences a man might have in a lifetime -- the two great ones known only to the fortunate. First was hearing the idolized girl say "yes"; and the other was watching brave, strong, well-armed men flee in terror from one's presence.

- Jeff Cooper, Africa Ciao!

Apropos: England Prevails

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? ... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago