A Quote by Herman Wouk
Strange, isn't it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.
Related Quotes
The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.
In every age states of varying size and constitution and at every level of development have found naval warfare to be one of their most formidable and expensive tasks. Ships have always been large, costly and complicated, and warships much more complicated and costly than any others. Scholars are nowadays inclined to emphasize the power, wealth and sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and there is not more striking illustration of this than the advanced and elaborate administrative structures of the early English navy.
There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men.
Fencing is more a sport than a martial art. It would be like basing your knowledge of roman phalanx warfare on NFL football.
Living indoors without fresh air quickly poisons the blood and makes people feel tired and seedy when they don't know why. For myself, I sleep out of doors in winter as well as summer. I only feel tired or seedy when I have been indoors a lot. I only catch cold when I sleep in a room.
It's important to study and understand your responsibilities within any profession, but it's particularly important for military officers to read, think, discuss, and write about the problem of war and warfare so they can understand not just the changes in the character of warfare but also the continuities.
War traumatizes soldier and civilian alike; warfare is a profit-making racket; warfare resolves nothing that negotiations can't resolve better; the weapons we have now make non-violence the only option to planetary annihilation.
We have got to bring together the best resources in America to understand that cyber warfare is the new warfare of the asymmetrical enemies that we face in this country.
We don't have to make toys that are coated with lead paint in China. We can make good toys in Alabama and North Carolina.
Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.
Journalism is "a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.
Fencing is a funny sport. Competitive fencing is not really very applicable to the stage world unless you're fighting with a rapier during the Renaissance, you know?
The only complicated things worth fighting for will change the world in some way and/or make you lots of money, and a complicated relationship will only keep you from doing either.
Now, the big box office successes are superhero stories. It seems there's a lowest common denominator mentality, in terms of movies that are almost purely visual, that anyone can understand anywhere in the world. Good robot, bad robot: they fight. You don't need to know anything apart from that. And then we can make toys that look like that robot - and sell those toys or video games.
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
For a few ticks of the clock I am here, uncomprehending, attempting to make some record or memorial of this eternal passage, like a traveler in a strange country through which he is being hurried on a schedule not of his making and for a purpose he does not understand.
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