"I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war."
I first encountered a fragment of this speech--a fragment in itself of a much larger Presidential address--through the song "Honour 2003" by the band VNV Nation, and it's a powerful piece of oration. It was a long, forgotten time when the United States of America weren't foaming at the mouth to jump into another international quarrel.
"What we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail."
– Samuel Beckett
Full speed ahead!
"The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure."
-Lyndon B. Johnson
"After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual,
selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood."
"To be yourself in a world that is
constantly trying to make you something else
is the greatest accomplishment."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
'Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit - not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.'
- William S. Burroughs
He leads me beside the still waters.
-Psalm 23:2
"I love you more than words can tell..."
-Robert Hunter
Our Excellency
"War is nothing more than old men standing in fields and waving their pricks at one another. It all boils down to this: men are insecure about the size of their dicks so they have to kill one another over the idea. That's what all of that male posturing, macho, asshole, jock-bullshit is all about........dick fear. .....You don't have to be a historian or political scientist to see the bigger dick-foreign policy theory at work...What? They have bigger dicks? Bomb them!! And of course all of the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks. It's a subconscious need to project the penis into other people's affairs. It's called fucking with people!!"
-George Carlin