Ralph Peters Quotes

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.

If there is a single power the West underestimates, it is the power of collective hatred.

He had to do the honorable thing, he understood that. Today of all days, it was vital to remain a gentleman, to speak faithfully and betray no emotions to his career's executioner. His family seemed ever destined for disappointment: his father, now him. Yet, he had done much, giving them all the victory they needed, that victory and more...
Only to have a low cabal poison Lincoln against him. Liars. Devils. Whoremongers. Intimating, in the wake of Mine Run, that he sympathized with the Confederacy, that he was unfit to command, even that he was cowardly. All because he would not squander thousands of men to no purpose. Oh, yes. Had he overruled all military judgment, common sense, and decency and ordered Warren to attack, had he sacrificed five thousand soldiers in an act of folly, he might have been forgiven. But powerful men never spotted near a battlefield had seized upon his refusal to charge Lee's entrenchments, coiling like snakes to strike his reputation. Their ardor for slaughter repelled him.
Perhaps he was better off being relieved. He could put this filth behind him, this infinite human vice of cold ambition. He could not understand how men could tell a public lie and then stand by it. He was not made for the politics of command, not for politics of any kind. He knew that his notions of honor seemed quaint, even laughable, to the likes of Sickles, Hooker, and Butterfield. But he could not imagine a life lived another way.

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 hadn't reached his hood in East L.A. But the radiation did. He'd been on Okinawa. His family had been home. Now the Jihadis were going to get their shit handed to them.

To study what men have done is to see ourselves as we are: History's mirror disintegrates our makeup. With its casualty lists, litany of atrocities, and suggestions that heroism, too, may require violence, history shows us "the skull beneath the skin." And no matter how firmly we shut our eyes, the skull will still be there.

The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted.

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

"Just one thing," Sasha said suddenly. Pavel looked inquiringly into his brother's exhausted features. "I won't go without my cat."

We know how to deal with apocalyptic blood-thirsty fanatics. We have two thousand years of historical examples in various religions of these death cults exploding out of the mainstream religion. And in two thousand years there is not a single example of these wildfire death cults being put down without extreme violence. Not a single example. But the Obama Administration doesn't know history, they don't want to know history, they don't want to deal with reality. And the reality is: That the way you deal with Islamic State - these blood-thirsty, blood-drunken terrorists - is to kill them, keep on killing them until you kill the last one, then you kill his pet goat! That's how you deal with them.

In the sour air of his tent, Meade viewed himself with an engineer's cold eye: too dark of thought, too dour, a man alert to the smell of sulfur, but not to Heaven's scent. His wife was a proud, loyal woman, of good family. He could hear Margaret teasing. "George, I know you can smile!" She had got him a brigadier's rank at the start of the war, when his merits had not sufficed. He would have to do his best for her. And for the Union, of course. Major General George Gordon Meade had been happiest building lighthouses.

[T]he American dream is still alive and well, thanks: Even the newest taxi driver stumbling over his English grammar knows he can truly become an American. But European Muslims can't become French or Dutch or Italian or German. Even if they qualify for a passport, they remain second-class citizens. On a good day. And they're supposed to take over the continent that's exported more death than any other?

When Europeans feel sufficiently provoked and threatened–a few serious terrorist attacks could do it–Europe's Muslims will be lucky just to be deported...

We [Americans] choose not to understand the world on terms other than our own.

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-colonel's 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, I'll 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 didn't 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 I'll 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.

Faced with opponents who sacrifice the innocent to their god, our generals study atheist guerrillas. To cope with fanatical killers with global ambitions, we turn to courts of law intended for common criminals. Pirates terrorize shipping lanes, while we wring our hands over their legal status. And all parties on the Potomac still insist that stability can be assured by supporting tyrants and that infernally corrupt governments are bound to reform if only we treat them respectfully. We mouth admirable principles for which we won't lift a finger. If we must be hypocrites, we should at least apply some intelligence to the task.