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
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
I think I like not-knowing better.
I agree with Fontessa. Damn those Germans!
Marianne
Read this one as a youngster and then again while deployed somewhere on the other side of the world.
I know I must have read “Night Flight” but I don’t remember it. I do have a 40-year old paperback of “Wind, Sand and Stars.” It has that slightly sweet odor that old books get, and the pages are aged to cafe au lait.
I guess I’ll print out the news story and tuck it into the book.
His “Flight to Arras” is a beautiful and deep book which doesn’t get read as much as some of his other stuff. The unfinished “Wisdom of the Sands” (an unfortunate title–it was called “Citadelle” in French) is also well worth reading.
“Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again.
When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- SJS
He, and John Gillespie McGee Jr. had that wonderful gift of capturing the wonder that invades your heart, and soul, when first you “slip the surly bounds of Earth.”
It is a gift that has undoubtedly driven thousands to follow their dream of flight.
You, sir, are a true inheritor of that gift and I urge you to utilize it to reach a broader audience than you do today. I’m sure that there lurks within your fertile mind the seeds of several books that may serve to ignite the spark in yet another generation. Get thee to thy computer, sire!