Charles

“I wrote this book to explain to my own satisfaction how the United States won every battle in and over Vietnam and yet lost the war. Such a defeat is unprecedented in the annals of military history. And we did lose the war. Our objective was to preserve South Vietnam as an ‘independent, non-Communist state,’ and we obviously failed to do that. Refusing to accept this defeat, or saying that we won the shooting war, may assuage our bruised egos, but it oversimplifies the conflict and distorts our understanding of its true nature…
- Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946-1975”
― Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam At War: The History 1946-1975

“In youth we learn; in age we understand.”
― Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

“If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.'

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century