"If you are not able to provide security for your own country, how can you guarantee liberties?"

“Oh! death will find me, long before I tire Of watching for you; and swing me suddenly Into the shade and loneliness and mire Of the last land!”

“It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...”

“Dance exists first on this primordial level, not on an intellectual plane (even though it requires skill and intelligence). Its inmost substance cannot be reasoned, only experienced.”

“A vacation from school should not mean hunger for our children.”

“I'm going to leave WWII. I considered and rejected doing something on the Pacific. Fourteen years is enough. I'd like to take on a different challenge and probably a different era. But it will be another war. It's what I do.”

Source : "Rick Atkinson talks 'The Guns at Last Light'". Interview with John Barron, www.chicagotribune.com. May 10, 2013.

“The stationary condition is the beginning of the end”

“Passover is my idea of a perfect holiday. Dear God, when you're handing out plagues of darkness, locusts, hail, boils, flies, lice, frogs, and cattle murrain, and turning the Nile to blood, and smiting firstborn, give me a pass, and tell me when it's over.”

“In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.”