Stephan Talty > Quotes

“There are three kinds of people,” he wrote later, “those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.”
― Stephan Talty, Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day

“L’Ollonais’s men were reported to have blown through 260,000 pieces of eight, or $13.5 million in today’s dollars, in three short weeks”
― Stephan Talty, Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign

“The writer H. P. Lovecraft would later provide an example of the animosity Americans felt toward the newcomers in a letter to a friend in which he described immigrants from Italy crowded into the Lower East Side as creatures who “could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human.” Instead, “they were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities.”
― Stephan Talty, The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History

“We were so tired of death and destruction,” Colonel Reed said. “We wanted to do something beautiful.”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“Now they needed a man to go across the line. Col. T.B. Hargis, Jr. called in Capt. Tom Stewart. Stewart, 30, was lanky, bookish and witty, a devout Christian and the son of a semi-famous senator from Tennessee. It’s likely he was chosen because he was decisive and smart. He knew a smattering of German — plus he could ride a horse. That was more than enough to qualify him for the job.”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“How sweet is success when the conditions leading it seem to bode ill,” Stewart thought. “Such, in all modesty, is the reward of virtue.” *”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“The oil business, as Erickson understood it, was and had always been amoral.”
― Stephan Talty, The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy

“The pirates understood what drove men,”
― Stephan Talty, Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign

“armies could go through a lake of gas in the blink of an eye. Take the medium-sized German Panther tank, used from the middle of 1943 to the end of the war. The Panther carried a Maybach V-12 engine that got about a third of a mile per gallon on good roads, and even less than that”
― Stephan Talty, The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy

“which no other failed applicant had even thought of trying to do, because most people don’t regard seeing as a skill you can get better at. And when it came to”
― Stephan Talty, Saving Bravo: The Greatest Rescue Mission in Navy SEAL History

“Rickettsia denotes the microbe’s genus, placing it in the bacteria family in the planet’s taxonomy; the name derives from the American pathologist Howard T. Ricketts, who studied—and succumbed to—typhus in 1910. Prowazekii pays tribute to the researcher Stanislaus von Prowazek, an Austrian bacteriologist who also died of typhus in 1915 while trying to unlock its secrets.”
― Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army

“Lind’s 1747 experiment looked at scurvy. Twelve sailors who had the illness were divided into six groups. The accommodations and diet of all the sailors were identical, but each received a different remedy: one group received cider; one got seawater; another, “elixir of vitriol”; the fifth group, two oranges and a lemon; and the sixth, a mix of spices with barley water. It was the first documented clinical trial in medical history.”
― Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army

“Three out of every four recruits never made it through the course, and trainers were”
― Stephan Talty, Saving Bravo: The Greatest Rescue Mission in Navy SEAL History

“Nowhere else would Napoleonic troops encounter soldiers who fought as fanatically or bravely when defending a position; a famous epigram said that you not only had to kill the Russian soldier, you had to then push him over.”
― Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army

“The intensity of it simply enters your heart and brain and tears every nerve to pieces.”
― Stephan Talty, War Hero: The Unlikely Story of A Stray Dog, An American Soldier and the Battle of Their Lives

“Patton, an avid horseman, didn’t know what to think. “It struck me as rather strange that, in the midst of a world at war, some twenty young and middle-aged men in great physical condition… had spent their entire time teaching a group of horses to wiggle their butts and raise their feet in consonance with certain signals from the heels and reins.”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“In Iowa, locals kidnapped a judge and threatened to hang him unless he agreed not to force any more families off their land.”
― Stephan Talty, Saving Bravo: The Greatest Rescue Mission in Navy SEAL History

“The Cossacks were led by their prince, Amazov, a legendary horseman and, Reed was relieved to find, “a most pleasant and helpful person.”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“In the late sixties, some Army soldiers had bought long-haired wigs to cover up their military haircuts. Not all that much had changed since then.”
― Stephan Talty, Saving Bravo: The Greatest Rescue Mission in Navy SEAL History

“Ninety percent of the population were serfs who could be beaten, killed, transported away from their family, or sold for a gambling debt or as collateral for a loan (a healthy male at the time would fetch between 200 and 500 rubles in the Moscow market; a good-looking young female, several times that).”
― Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army

“The horses were, at last, safe from Czech partisans, Nazi science, Russian cooks,”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“The rat, which transported bubonic plague, and the louse, which carried typhus, were despised but accepted presences in almost every human society, although the latter could travel places (such as the Arctic) where even the rat couldn’t survive.”
― Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army

“Therefore I cannot but see and feel that time is passing, and I with it, and yet I would not like to go without performing some great action to serve as a monument to my name. What is lost today will not be found tomorrow and I have done nothing so far to cover myself with glory.”
― Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army

“Hitler, who despised spies (even his own), had directed that secret agents be given a special distinction at the guillotine. They were to be turned face-upwards and forced to watch the blade descend toward their neck.”
― Stephan Talty, The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy

“Patton, it was said, loved horses more than he did most human beings.”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“It is not enough to say, as Sir John Seeley would later comment, that England “seemed to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”
― Stephan Talty, Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign

“Such, in all modesty, is the reward of virtue.”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“Adolf Hitler coveted the Lipizzaner for its white coat and for its perceived racial purity.”
― Stephan Talty, Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

“extinguish the flames. When the fires went out, Cullinan”
― Stephan Talty, The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy

“erysipelas,”
― Stephan Talty, Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign