Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.