Brian S. Wise

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Brian S..

https://www.goodreads.com/brianswise

Washington Irving...
Brian S. Wise is currently reading
by Brian Jay Jones (Goodreads Author)
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (page 1 of 456)
Dec 25, 2025 05:18PM

 
Loading...
David McCullough
“The answer reached the President at five minutes past four that afternoon, Tuesday, August 14. Japan had surrendered. At 6:10 the Swiss chargé d'affaires in Washington arrived at the State Department to present Secretary [of State James] Byrnes with the Japanese text, which Byrnes carried at once to the White House.

"(The document would have arrived ten minutes sooner but for the fact that a sixteen-year-old messenger, Thomas E. Jones, who picked it up at the RCA offices on Connecticut Avenue to deliver to the Swiss legation, had been stopped by the police for making a U-turn on Connecticut.)”
David McCullough, Truman

Christopher Hitchens
“I have changed my mind on a number of things, including almost everything having to do with Cuba, but the idea that we should be grateful for having been spared, and should shower our gratitude upon the supposed Galahad of Camelot for his gracious lenience in opting not to commit genocide and suicide, seemed a bit creepy. When Kennedy was shot the following year, I knew myself somewhat apart from this supposedly generational trauma in that I felt no particular sense of loss at the passing of such a high-risk narcissist. If I registered any emotion, it was that of mild relief.”
Christopher Hitchens

William F. Buckley Jr.
“The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz: and still, great grown people sit around, declare themselves to be Marxists, and make excuses for Gulag and Afghanistan.”
William F. Buckley, Jr.

David Lipsky
“David [Foster Wallace] is a Cosmopolitan subscriber; he says reading 'I've Cheated - Should I Tell?' a bunch of times a year is 'fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.”
David Lipsky (Author)

Christopher Hitchens
“Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.”
Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

year in books
Mainon
3,754 books | 340 friends



Favorite Genres



Polls voted on by Brian S.

Lists liked by Brian S.