Jack Cady Quotes

A lot of preachers will be glad this man is gone, and that’s one good thing you can say for him. He drove nice people crazy. This man was a hellion, pure and simple; but what folks don’t understand is, hellions have their place. They put everything on the line over nothing very much. Most guys worry so much about dying, they never do any living. Jesse was so alive with living, he never gave dying any thought.

So what use are we? Burnside hopes to die exhausted in a cathouse, with the sweet-sweet taste of bourbon on his tongue. My own ambition is less raunchy. I want, at age ninety, to be gunned down while storming the Congress.

I needed this the way guys in trenches need head lice.

Humans, being creative, can rewrite anything.
...which is a coy way of suggesting that each young generation invents history according to its own bigotries. The rewritten history gets quoted to show that one or another special group has perpetually saved civilization while suffering abuse known only to holy saints. The justification for historians is the same as the justification for janitors. Both sweep up the mess when the public gets done trashing.

I now knew what it was, but just because you can name a thing does not mean you understand it.

The reason to understand history is not to avoid the mistakes of history—because some fool will make those mistakes for you. Some maniac will start a war, and some other maniac will drop an atom bomb, and you'll be the poor bastard who gets to drop the bomb or be hit by it.
No, you understand history so you can understand yourself.

I saw old-fashioned cities, quiet streets, small shops, colorful flags and ornaments and decorations—life before machine guns, before communism and capitalism and the ambitions of generals.

You can only picture the future based on what you know about the past. If history dies the future can only be hideous.

I lay in darkness admitting even I had managed to conceal truth beneath a pile of crap. For old men, Hell comes in two versions, lesser and greater.
The lesser version happens when history is rewritten, their records expunged, no credit given for ideals or aspirations, nothing bequeathed, all tales revised as the Present, turning, points to a false record and accuses the past for Present suffering.
That’s a stern Hell, but the greater version is worse. Hell for old men arrives at that exact moment when we must admit we can no longer protect our kids, our families, our country, the shards and remnants of our love.

“I almost don’t believe in ghosts.”
She was stating part of the problem. If ghosts are a metaphor for history, then belief is a leap into reality. If history is a metaphor for ghosts, matters get really serious.

I watched the flickers, thought of modern times, and it came to me that we’ve never stopped fighting. When our wars ceased, a rearguard action began. We fought against deterioration of order; and lost as an old culture died and society went crazy at the funeral. Yammer got crowned King, with chatter its Queen.

It’s no big job to fool yourself.

The fires of history burn hot and long, but memories of fires do not burn long enough.

The whole business lay ringed with mystery, with improbabilities, but also with certainty of total destruction if we failed. There might be total destruction if we succeeded, but that was someone else’s problem. We could only set the standard, write our last will and testament through action, and hope someone could still read deeply enough to raise arms against the encroaching night.

The world was changing, and it wouldn’t change back.