Matthew Gleason

“Like the Indian Wars, it would leave a troubled feeling, a trauma, in its wake. Crusades, even when failures, are emotionally satisfying. Wars of containment, wars of policy, are not. They are hard to justify unless it is admitted that power, not idealism, is the dominant factor in the world, and that idealism must be backed by power.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“During my eighteen years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball. —MICKEY MANTLE I”
― Lenny Dykstra, House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge

“the cynical could afford the luxury of their cynicism because of the stability of the system they mocked.”
― John Scalzi, The Consuming Fire

“A stagnant navy,” noted one maritime scholar, “was no place for a man on the make.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette