Herman Wouk > Quotes

“When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”
― Herman Wouk

“This life is slow suicide, unless you read.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.”
― Herman Wouk

“Remember this, if you can--there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven't. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end--only in the end it becomes more obvious.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, "How would I do this if I were a fool?" Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.”
― Herman Wouk, This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life

“The girl you marry and the woman you must make a life with are two different people.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.”
― Herman Wouk, Don't Stop the Carnival

“Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.”
― Herman Wouk

“Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.”
― Herman Wouk, Don't Stop the Carnival

“You can’t understand command till you’ve had it. It’s the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It’s a nightmare, unless you’re an ox. You’re forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn.

For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world's worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet thought their bones like in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star, and for the moment it was enough to be where she was.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Religious discipline is nothing but a permanent psychic shelter. You stay inside it, and you’re less vulnerable to whatever horrors happen in life.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.”
― Herman Wouk

“About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood's barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours; there is no life without them.”
― Herman Wouk

“I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off. ”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“With the smoke of the dead sailor's cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts--not the words, the realities--break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“Money is a very pleasant thing, Willie, and I think you can trade almost anything for it wisely except the work you really want to do. If you sell out your time for a comfortable life, and give up your natural work, I think you lose the exchange. There remains an inner uneasiness that spoils the comforts.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“Willie didn't have a historian's respect for the victories at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Midway. The stream of news as it burbled by his mind left only a confused impression that our side was a bit ahead in the game, but making painful slow work of it. He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn't know that he knew. This war seemed to him different from all the others: diffuse, slogging, and empty of drama.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“The Jewish Sabbath may be too hard for some people, or they may not subscribe to its ideas; but within its own terms it is a dramatic ceremony penetrating all of life. It is not simply a day off. This demanding rite turns twenty-four hours of every week into a separated time, apart in mood, texture, acts, and events from daily existence.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“It’s occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.”
― Herman Wouk, The Winds of War

“Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.”
― Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance

“She had learned from her encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world-the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar