A difficult man

By lex, on August 4th, 2008

My favorite professor at the US Naval Academy was a nattily dressed Pole with a charming accent and a casually exuberant attitude that stood in vivid contrast to the dour, patched elbow shabbiness of his departmental colleagues. Most of them were humorless liberals of the garden variety East Coast cohort, men and women who seemed to have purposefully installed themselves within the belly of the military-industrial beast, the better for to shake us from the bourgeois certainties of our middle class upbringing and preach the gospel of the Omnipresent Virtuous State. So long, you know, as the machinery of state was composed of bureaucrats from correct-thinking cadres.

Otherwise, not so much.

Credo

"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me."

— John Paul Jones

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature"

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."

— Edmund Burke

"Μολὼν λαβέ"

— Leonidas

"Blogito Ergo Sum"

— Neptunus Lex