Stan Goff Quotes

That sounds stupid, but people have to remember that being raised a white male in the U.S.in the fifties and sixties, for most of us, meant being raised stupid.

It's the same hope we have to hold for humanity - that we can transform our roles, roles constructed like so many doors for us to go through by history, and by and by transform the whole edifice of human relations.

Stupidity is a tough, fecund thing, like crabgrass.

The appearance of precision and order are so important to military commanders because they are generally idiots who couldn't plan a decent cocktail party, especially the bureaucrats who float to the top of the Officer Personnel Management System. They require the appearance of precision and order because their operations, this one being emblematic, are goat fucks.

Uniforms standardize the way we recognize military members who outrank us, so we can avoid ass chewings for failure to refer to someone as sergeant or sir or your majesty, or for failure to salute them.

People who claim, for example, that capitalism can overcome its dependence on fossil fuel have either not researched the question or they are on mescaline.

I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN's Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command.

Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project.

Race was an issue because in every assignment I have had in Special Operations, racism has been as much a part of the social bond as football and fast cars. I never cared for either of them either, but this was special.

So here I am, a white man telling Black children to not give white people the benefit of the doubt. It's not prejudice I'm giving them, it's survival. Don't talk to strangers. Don't trust white folk you don't know. Don't trust cops. The basics. When Black folk don't want to walk right up and be my friend, I don't take it personally, and I don't get defensive. And I'll tell other thin-skinned white people the same thing. It's not personal. It's survival. Get used to it, and quit whining.

The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman ... Every soldier is the same fallible breed of human that we are. The making of war, even the most necessary and 'just' war, hardens human hearts.

Politics is economics by other means, and war is politics by other means.

War technology is science in the service of obscene anatomical vandalism.

I've never actually seen the military used to any higher moral purpose. There is always the bottom line, somewhere, somehow.

If being a perfect soldier meant continuing to follow any fucking order I was given, then I would have to settle for being a mediocre soldier.

American culture is a sheep culture - long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best - commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I'm a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus.

I felt small, like one does when the distance between stars occasionally asserts itself into your understanding, like when your own death's inevitability leaps in front of you in the middle of the night when you get up to pee.