David Muse

“Job is no more than the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God. His thunderings at Job so completely miss the point that one cannot help but see how much he is occupied with himself. The tremendous emphasis he lays on his omnipotence and greatness makes no sense in relation to Job, who certainly needs no more convincing, but only becomes intelligible when aimed at a listener who doubts it.”
― C.G. Jung, Answer to Job

“Each man’s morality, thought Georgia, is a compromise between the strength of his character and the strength of his environment. Where you have no character to fix the ratio, you get the genius and the lunatic, to whom morality is meaningless.”
― Nicholas Blake, The Smiler with the Knife

“The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.”
― David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations

“Events,” wrote George Ball, paraphrasing Emerson “are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”
― David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations