39 Quotes by Michael Shaara

In a land where all slaves are servants, all servants are slaves, and thus ends democracy.

The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.

How do you force a man to fight – for freedom? The idiocy of it jarred him.

He was one of those, like Stuart, who looked on war as God’s greatest game.

He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become.

A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.

It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.

So it was no cause and no country he fought for, no ideal and no justice. He fought for his people, for the children and the kin, and not even the land, because not even the land was worth the war, but the people were, wrong as they were, insane even as many of them were, they were his own, he belonged with his own.