Thomas E. Ricks Quotes

In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It is thinking and doing.

Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice90

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

One gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

He was beginning to mull the nature of the postwar world. This was, of course, informed by what he had seen of Hitler and Stalin, and also by his experience in Spain. Early in the war, well before the United States entered it, he was worried about the world that would emerge from the conflict. He suggested in the spring of 1941 that totalitarianism might spread around the world. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life. . . .

The second driver of the current Orwell boom is the post-9/11 rise of the intelligence state.

Jefferson would remain devoted to Epicurean thought for the remainder of his life. He summarized that belief system thusly: Happiness the aim of life. Virtue the foundation of happiness Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice90

Jefferson did not detail his objections, but he likely was irked by Montesquieu’s conclusion that a major cause of Rome’s decline was Epicurean thought.

Adams was paying attention to such thinking. He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew’s reputation.

George Washington’s ability to observe and learn seems to me underappreciated. James Madison’s contributions, especially his designing gridlock into the American system, also seem to me to be undervalued. John Adams, by contrast, began to strike me as having an inflated reputation in recent years, with insufficient attention paid to his unhelpful commentary during the War for Independence and also his disastrous presidency. Likewise, though raised by my parents to revere Thomas Jefferson, I increasingly found myself disturbed by his habitual avoidance of reality.

in 1942 in an essay in which he meditated on some “visions of a totalitarian future.” In it, he explained why he thought the working class would be most resistant to an intrusive right-wing state:

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him — products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere.

In a letter to President Madison mainly about his sheep Jefferson concluded with a quotation from Horace’s very Epicurean sixth epistle: Vive, vale, et siquid novisti rectius istis Candidus imperti sinon, his ulere mecum.73 That is, in the translation of the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart, “Live: be happy. If you know of any thing preferable to these maxims, candidly communicate it: if not, with me make use of these.

Other wartime leaders would do well to imitate his inquisitive approach. They should not look for consensus, and instead should examine differences between advisors, asking them for the reasons for their different views.

What was most important and really new about the Age of Reason was the sublime confidence of the intellectuals and societal leaders in the power of man’s reason,