Thomas E. Ricks Quotes

American journalist (born 1955)

Thomas Edwin "Tom" Ricks (born September 25, 1955) and is a member of the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy think tank. Ricks lectures widely to the military and is a member of Harvard University's Senior Advisory Council on the Project on U.S. Civil-Military Relations. Ricks is the author of several nonfiction books including Making the Corps (1997); the bestselling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) and its follow-up, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (2009); the bestselling First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (2020); and Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (2022).

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Alternative Names: Thomas Ricks • Thomas Edwin Ricks

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Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, “To be enlightened was to be filled with hope.”54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was “superstition, intolerance, tyranny.”55

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.

the theme that runs powerfully through all of Orwell’s writings, from his early work on Burmese Days through the late 1930s and then through the great essays, and into Animal Farm and 1984, is the abuse of power in the modern world by both the left and the right.

Orwell usually wrote as an observer, but here he is a prescriber, laying down rules and offering advice. A careful writer, he instructs, should ask himself about every sentence a series of questions, such as what he is trying to say and what words will best express it. He should be especially careful about using stale, worn-out imagery that fails to really evoke an image in the reader’s mind. He summarizes his points succinctly, offering six “elementary” rules: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Any writer today would do well to post those rules on the wall of his or her work space. Less noted about the essay is that it isn’t simply against bad writing, it is suspicious of what motivates such prose. He argues that writing that is obscure, dull, and Latinate is made that way for a purpose — generally, in order to disguise what is really happening. “Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” So, he writes memorably, in one of his best passages anywhere: Defenceless villages are