4 Quotes by Thomas E. Ricks

More than anything else, I have learned in researching this book that America is a moving target, a goal that must always be pursued but never quite reached.

It is a cliché, and a bad one, that generals try to “fight the last war” – that is, do what worked the last time out. That does not give them enough credit. Rather they tend to fight the war they would like to fight or the one they expected to fight. But neither of those responses is usually sufficient. The foremost task of a general is to understand the nature of the war he or she faces – which often turns out to be a third way, neither the one preferred nor the one expected.

As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “You pays your money and you makes your choice!” That may be the most American sentence ever written.

On December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own party’s government, stepped out of a taxi on New York’s Fifth Avenue.