Matthew Gleason

“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

“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

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

“As a culture, we had no heroes. Certainly not any politician—Barack Obama was then the most admired man in America (and likely still is), but even when the country was enraptured by his rise, most Middletonians viewed him suspiciously. George W. Bush had few fans in 2008. Many loved Bill Clinton, but many more saw him as the symbol of American moral decay, and Ronald Reagan was long dead. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. I doubt my neighbors could even name a high-ranking military officer. The space program, long a source of pride, had gone the way of the dodo, and with it the celebrity astronauts. Nothing united us with the core fabric of American society. We felt trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream—a steady wage.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis