126 Quotes by Herman Wouk

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.

Human life cannot be formless. We live by patterns. We move in comradeships. Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu - and a recognizable part - unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return. The sensible thing is to use hard thinking to find the right way to live and then to live that way. What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear.

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.

Not that I really think the Caine is inanimate. It’s an iron poltergeist sent into the world by God.

Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.

See, the Germans aren’t kidding about the Jews. They’re cooking us down to soap over there. They think we’re vermin and should be ’sterminated and our corpses turned into something useful.

The Talmud: Heart’s Blood of the Jewish Faith...

Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.