Stan Goff > Quotes

“American culture is a sheep culture—long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best—commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I’m a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“It's always easier to pretend you know something than it is to learn about it. It's always easier to be cute than it is to be rigorous. It is easier to talk trash than it is to practice the humility of the serious student.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“I’ve never actually seen the military used to any higher moral purpose. There is always the bottom line, somewhere, somehow.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“So here I am, a white man telling Black children to not give white people the benefit of the doubt. It’s not prejudice I’m giving them, it’s survival. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t trust white folk you don’t know. Don’t trust cops. The basics. When Black folk don’t want to walk right up and be my friend, I don’t take it personally, and I don’t get defensive. And I’ll tell other thin-skinned white people the same thing. It’s not personal. It’s survival. Get used to it, and quit whining.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“But paranoids might have real enemies and obsessives might obsess about really important stuff.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“Remember that Caligula was not a cause, he was an effect.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project.”
― stan goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“That sounds stupid, but people have to remember that being raised a white male in the U.S.in the fifties and sixties, for most of us, meant being raised stupid.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“Stupidity is a tough, fecund thing, like crabgrass.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“There’s a trendy phrase making the rounds among intellectuals these days: compassion fatigue. We’ve just grown so tired of caring so much about the suffering of little black children in the Mississippi Delta, about the barbarism directed at gays and lesbians, about the murders of Salvadoran peasants, that we just really don’t have the energy to give a fuck any more … Compassion is a luxury of comfort, often paternalistic, frequently a thin veil over contempt. Solidarity is a much tougher proposition.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“It's the same hope we have to hold for humanity—that we can transform our roles, roles constructed like so many doors for us to go through by history, and by and by transform the whole edifice of human relations.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“I think we are all about to become rootless. It may be time. The soil has become poisonous.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“The academic is sharing in the bourgeois’ loot, in a hundred little ways. And the peasant understands necessity as something that transcends mortality. To be in community with that peasant, the Chapel Hill academic will have to commit class suicide.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“People who are under the same hegemonic-for-the-time-being power become furtive. They drop comments to test one another. They feel out levels of resentment. They sniff for willingness to take eventual action.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“People who claim, for example, that capitalism can overcome its dependence on fossil fuel have either not researched the question or they are on mescaline.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“If being a perfect soldier meant continuing to follow any fucking order I was given, then I would have to settle for being a mediocre soldier.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Race was an issue because in every assignment I have had in Special Operations, racism has been as much a part of the social bond as football and fast cars. I never cared for either of them either, but this was special.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“The appearance of precision and order are so important to military commanders because they are generally idiots who couldn’t plan a decent cocktail party, especially the bureaucrats who float to the top of the Officer Personnel Management System. They require the appearance of precision and order because their operations, this one being emblematic, are goat fucks.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“George W. Bush committed impeachable offenses in waging war in Iraq.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“The dialectical movement of economics, politics, and military power is folding and swirling like weather. Politics is being reshaped by military failure. Military failure is being shaped by economics.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“When you are massively outgunned, you do not fire and give away your position.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman ... Every soldier is the same fallible breed of human that we are. The making of war, even the most necessary and 'just' war, hardens human hearts.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“The point is that when one is dealing with a too-powerful-for-the-present force, pragmatism demands one bite one's lip, play the game, and become very alert.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“Politics is economics by other means, and war is politics by other means.”
― Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century

“Uniforms standardize the way we recognize military members who outrank us, so we can avoid ass chewings for failure to refer to someone as sergeant or sir or your majesty, or for failure to salute them.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Racism—if you look closely—is about profit. The whole system was built on it. War—if you look closely—is about profit. Poverty, which is not, and never has been, an accident—if you look closely—is about profit.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“Young professionals, I reminded myself, sympathetic as they may seem with a disarming modesty, are always necessarily invested in conservatism.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti

“I felt small, like one does when the distance between stars occasionally asserts itself into your understanding, like when your own death’s inevitability leaps in front of you in the middle of the night when you get up to pee.”
― Stan Goff, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti