Ralph Peters > Quotes

“Writing is wretched, discouraging, physically unhealthy, infinitely frustrating work. And when it all comes together it’s utterly glorious."

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Pep Talk”
― Ralph Peters

“A soldier’s duty…” Taylor intoned the last word in a voice of granite, “is to do an honest day’s work in dishonest times… and to make the best out of the worst fucking mess imaginable. It means… believing in your heart that some things are more important than your personal devils… or even your personal beliefs. It means the willingness to give up… everything.” Taylor sat back in his chair, never breaking eye contact. “And sometimes it just means lacing up your boots one more time when the whole world’s going to shit.”
― Ralph peters, The War in 2020

“Human beings may hate a distant enemy in theory, but they generally prefer to kill their neighbors.”
― Ralph Peters, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century

“Our history deserves honesty and our citizens need it. Without understanding who we really were, we’ll never quite grasp who we have become, leaving us prey to demagogues and despicable entertainments.”
― Ralph Peters, The Damned of Petersburg

“War was a sorrier business than storybooks told.”
― Ralph Peters, Cain at Gettysburg

“These books are so splendid, they frustrate readers conditioned to lesser historical fiction in which every Confederate officer was young, dashing, and raised with a free-black best friend on a progressive plantation, or that features a feisty, clandestinely educated, proto-liberated woman rebelling valiantly against the constricting patriarchal societies of bygone centuries (all the while wearing enthralling dresses). The first sort of novel romanticizes the past, the second euthanizes it. The”
― Ralph Peters, Hell or Richmond: A Novel

“But a man lies to himself, and never more so than he does about a woman.”
― Ralph Peters, Cain at Gettysburg: A Novel

“I wish you to place your division across this road, and I wish you to get there,”
― Ralph Peters, Cain at Gettysburg: A Novel

“But in the real world-in which even academics perish-war often changes everything. The blood-drunk killer is rarely disarmed by the man who lives in books-or by the eternal adolescent clinging to the lie that all men want peace.”
― Ralph Peters, Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization

“that favored the artful defender. And Breathed’s”
― Ralph Peters, Valley of the Shadow

“Lee was tough as hickory, but the tree was old.”
― Ralph Peters, Cain at Gettysburg: A Novel

“Don’t go thinking I was one of these hellfire-and-brimstone fellers. No, sir. I put more stock in Jesus than Jeremiah. And I never tried to tell a man Jesus really turned that wine into water, not the other way around. Just tried to persuade him that getting hog-drunk and killing his own brother wasn’t Christian.”
― Ralph Peters, Cain at Gettysburg: A Novel

“He had learned long ago that dying was not hard. The harder course was to defy the odds, to endure life’s torments stoically.”
― Ralph Peters, Hell or Richmond: A Novel

“the Confederacy had been poisoned by more jealousies than a hundred high-bred gals could muster in competition for a single male.”
― Ralph Peters, Judgment at Appomattox: A Novel

“When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened–even when the threat's concocted nonsense–they don't just react, they overreact with stunning ferocity. One of their more humane (and frequently employed) techniques has been ethnic cleansing.”
― Ralph Peters, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century

“A Christian man ponders eternity for decades, only to find it's fifteen minutes long.”
― Ralph Peters, Darkness at Chancellorsville

“How could courage be so utterly useless?”
― Ralph Peters, Darkness at Chancellorsville