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

“This world isn’t governed by honorable men, but by lawyers and politicians, and whenever such scum come across an honest man they have to kill him.”
― Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Devil

“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