William Manchester Quotes

The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.

A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.

Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.)

An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.

His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them. Like them, he was slandered and misunderstood.

The sum of a million facts is not the truth.

I try to be as ruthless as possible. I ask myself of each sentence, "Is it clear? Is it true? Does it feel good?" And if it's not, then I rewrite it.

I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.

To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

His [Gen. Douglas MacArthurs] twenty-two medals-thirteen of them for heroism-probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields.

I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.

The colors of the underwater rock [are] as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th-century marchioness.

It is the definition of an egoist that whatever occupies his attention is, for that reason, important.

The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.

The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.

They were following their prime minister, matching their government's mood.