Here I must inject a personal note—I never shed blood upon the field o — Ralph Peters

"When I mentioned my decision to retire, it surprised everyone. The immediate advice from peers was that I should stay on for at least two years from the date of my promotion, since that was the minimum period of service-in-grade required, with a waiver, to qualify for a lieutenant-colonels retirement pay. It showed how little they knew me: the notion that I would hang on for an additional year, counting down the days, just to collect a few hundred dollars more each month offended me. For the rest of my life, Ill be paid as a retired major, and I have never wished it otherwise. The Army was good to me even then, and the chain of command asked what it would take to make me change my mind and stay in uniform. I didnt even consider the offer. Once you make up your mind on so weighty an issue, you stick by your decision. And had I said, "Oh, assign me to X and Ill hang around," it would have seemed as if the whole fuss had been a bit of theater to get whatever I wanted. I had always served with dignity, if sometimes obstreperously, and I intended to leave on my own terms. Three and a half years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I did regret retiring from the Army. But my fate lay elsewhere."

"This is Ladoga Five. I have a special artillery vehicle with me. I can use the long-range set, if necessary." "Good. Get your vehicles on the road. And whatever you do, keep moving. We will all be behind you." The gravity in his commanders voice, and his simple choice of words, moved Bezarin. He switched over to his battalion radio net, anxious to send out the words that would set them all in motion. He knew that his tanks needed more time to resupply, that the stray vehicles had not been sufficiently integrated into the grouping to do much beyond merely following the vehicle to their immediate front. But he knew that now, with a great hole punched through the last line of the enemys defense, there time was the dominant factor. He felt simultaneously elated and half-wild with small, cloying frustrations. He worked his radio in a fierce, uncompromising voice that had matured in the space of a morning. Major Bezarin wanted to move."

"They moved up between black trees, trip-me stumps, and small boulders. Everything in this world seemed disordered, messed up. Crazy people. Who started all this. For what? The nuclear blast hadnt reached his hood in East L.A. But the radiation did. Hed been on Okinawa. His family had been home. Now the Jihadis were going to get their shit handed to them."

"As Hancock issued the order to Mott to move his division up onto White Oak Road, a cavalcade appeared behind his trail brigade. "Better hold off," Hancock told the division commander. "See what the hell they want. Just get de Trobriand placed. Then come back." His leg scourged him doubly. He almost felt like pounding his thigh with his fists, to beat out the pus and hammer the pain to death. Preceded by outriders, Grant and Meade came cantering side by side, trailed by more flags than a Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia. Behind the banners, enough well-mounted cavalrymen followed to be put to good use, had they not been retained to serve as palace guards. Their uniforms were mud-clotted now, to the delight of troopers less fortunate."

"To those who solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

"On February 1, 1998, I woke up as a civilian. And life got interesting."

"The absolute requisites for the study of this work... are a knowledge of algebra to the binomial at least, plane and solid geometry, plane trigonometry, and the most simple part of the usual applications of algebra to geometry. ...A. De Morgan. London July 1, 1836"

"Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading."

"Ive been taking a closer look at these graduates. They are actually taller, stronger, smarter than we were, smart enough maybe to take our mistakes as their messages, to make our weaknesses their lessons, and to make our example — good and not so good — part of their education."

"In short, it is not merely that Johnny cant read, or even that Johnny cant think. Johnny doesnt know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools. [emphasis in the original]"

"Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both."

"Im very sad that this seems to be the No. 1 question people want to discuss. I had nothing to do with the issue other than what the media created. I was innocently drawn into the whole controversy. So, after many years, Im glad at least now that I have been given the opportunity to explain to the public and fans my side of the story in my own words. At a lecture, back in 1989, I was asked a question about blasphemy according to Islamic Law, I simply repeated the legal view according to my limited knowledge of the Scriptural texts, based directly on historical commentaries of the Quran. The next day the newspaper headlines read, "Cat Says, Kill Rushdie." I was abhorred, but what could I do? I was a new Muslim. If you ask a Bible student to quote the legal punishment of a person who commits blasphemy in the Bible, he would be dishonest if he didnt mention Leviticus 24:16."