People From Missouri

"That afternoon we took Le Charmel. There weren't many of us left."

"When the decorating part of the ceremony was over they marched us around and placed us on the reviewing line behind General Pershing. That review was the grandest sight I've ever seen. The First Division went by with its scarlet "One." The Second with its Indian Head. Jesse had been given the D.S.C. and was somewhere in the reviewing line, and i wondered what he thought of that head. Last came our own Third Division, with its blue and white bars. Infantry, line after line, poured past us, machine-guns, engineer and special troops- clicking like a machine. Caterpillar tractors kicking up the dirt. Seventy-fives traveling in a cloud of dust. I looked at General Pershing. It seemed to me he was growing taller and straighter all the time. He'd rare up on his shoes, as he watched, then come down on his heels again. He was a soldier from the ground up! And I didn't blame him for being proud of our outfits that day. When I looked back at the lines of men, marching and marching past us, at the flags and the artillery and the horses, I felt cold chills running over me. I felt stirred up and warlike inside. I was almost sorry the war was over."

"His episcopal administration of the Leavenworth Diocese was eminently successful. The growth of the Church under his jurisdiction was marked by the foundation of new congregations, and the building of churches and parochial schools. Catholic societies were strengthened and the diocesan statutes revised to enforce the decrees of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore under present conditions. He adopted practical means of enforcing the papal "Motu Proprio"' on Church music."

"I am a conservative small-business guy and farmer, I know what it's like to sign both sides of a paycheck."

"We caught a B&O train out of St. Louis for Philadelphia, and it was just our luck that it ran five and a half hours late before we got to Philadelphia. The scenery on our trip was lost to us, because we were covered with dust and roasted too. However I did enjoy winding in and out among the mountains of West Virginia."

"I don't have a group that I belong to. I'm not part of the Conservative Caucus in the House. I'm not part of anyone. I'm an independent thinker. I try to represent the voice of the people. When people ask me what my agenda is, I don’t have an agenda as far as me personally. If you look at the bills I've carried in the past, I've put all kinds of things on the table — whether it's something I agree with or don’t agree with. I always try to be an advocate of the people."

"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction"

"I've been giving this decision a lot of thought for the last couple of months, and it really doesn’t matter if you file the first day or the last day. I've had a lot of encouragement from fellow legislators and constituents and family members encouraging me to run."

"We talk about if term limits are a good thing and most legislators would agree that it's not a good thing because this is such a learning process."

"Personally, I don’t think we had a sense of mission early in the 1930s. The world had been made safe for democracy not too long before, and there seemed no chance of a war. We weren’t conscious of Hitler. I happened to be in the Philippines during those times, and we had a bomb squadron, a fighter squadron, an observation squadron, and a pursuit squadron over there. We flew around the islands and did our training because that’s what you did in peacetime. I know that we didn’t have a sense of purpose at that time. We didn’t see anything on the horizon; we weren’t worried about anything. We were just worried about getting enough airplanes to fly, and we were worried about getting our flying done."

"The crews wanted to look up to their commanders. Good Lord, their lives depended on their commander! I never saw crews that didn’t admire their commander unless he was a very poor stick."

"Those Schweinfurt missions were unbelievable. I know that I was fortunate enough to receive the Medal of Honor for fifteen minutes of fighting, over Ploesti, and they fought for about five hours over Schweinfurt. I don’t remember anyone getting a Medal of Honor out of that. I think I would rather do five Ploesti raids than one Schweinfurt."

"To go back to the issue of the effectiveness of the strategic campaign, I must say that there are only certain things you can do with airplanes. You don’t have to be a genius to know that if you knock out an enemy’s oil, he can’t fly."

"I never gave a thought to it being atomic warfare only. I was just training the crews, getting them combat capable to do whatever they needed to do. I don’t think we thought of ourselves as world destroyers or world savers or anything. We were given a job to do. I personally believe in disciplining units. I always believed that non-disciplined units were lousy; they never did a good job anywhere. I don’t mean to emphasize strict discipline of the martinet type, but expecting people to do things they are supposed to do, when they are supposed to do them."

"We knew if we had airplanes that could go someplace, we could take them there and hopefully bring them back. I think that was understood by all of us, and that the airplanes could bomb."

"I think all of us understood the mission, that SAC certainly had priority over everything in all of our minds. I had served enough places and positions in those years to see that. SAC had the mission, really, to deter. We didn’t want war; we wanted to deter war, and the atomic force was going to deter the war."

"When we demobilized the Air Force, I was in personnel and we were making plans for an orderly demobilization. I remember being over at the railroad station trying to figure out how many troops could be carried by the railways from San Francisco to various parts of the country as the men came home from the Pacific. General Muir Fairchild was sitting there. “What if the people demand to get out,” he asked? We said, “Well, gee, the plan won’t work.” The men did demand to get out immediately, and I let them out. All of this helps explain the condition of the Air Force at the time. Another example: the records of my wartime group were left on the floor up at Rapid City, South Dakota. Some of them were gathered up and sent to the Pentagon when I was there; but in general, there was no one left even to keep the records of the units from World War II. We started from nothing, from nothing, to rebuild the Air Force. I think this helps explain this lack of readiness all the way through."

"General LeMay asked, “What’s wrong with SAC?” I replied, “I won’t tell you. I have three young officers here with me who told you, and they mentioned cross-training.” We were so busy fighting our headquarters and trying to get the training that we didn’t have time to do anything else."

"We arrived in Colorado the day the state legalized cannibalism. Chic restaurants were charging a small fortune for a 6-ounce human steak, and the ludicrously wealthy or hopelessly fashionable paid for the thrill of breaking yet another taboo."

"I think you’re getting paranoid. Let me correct that: you've been paranoid your whole life, and it’s starting to show again."

"“Art,” Frankly goes on, “has always been a polite form of terrorism.”"

"“I know what the worst sins are,” Madeleine said, “and there are only 2 of them: doing nothing, and doing too little.”"

"All I really know about death is precisely what I know about the future: it can’t be predicted, and the more you think you know, the less prepared you are for the surprises."

"Nowism refutes psychology. It says that who you are is who you are. Don’t blame your parents, your upbringing, your culture. Once you are accepting the Now, you’re in control."

"People didn’t entirely believe the story, but they acted as if they did. It was like campaign promises—you chose your candidates on the basis of promises you knew they wouldn’t keep. The ability to hold contradictory ideas had become central to getting by in the world."

"“Why isn’t the government already whole-hog totalitarian?” Frizz cocked his head slightly, peering at her, happy she had asked. “Because they stumbled upon something better. No need to forcibly hold back the people. You don’t even need to prevent information from getting out—although sometimes, stupidly, they still do. Instead, you set up a megaMedia so pervasive that other news doesn’t really count.” He was getting worked up not, throwing his arms around while he spoke. “If the megaMedia doesn’t cover something, it ain’t news. Who cares what some intellectual magazine has to say, or some tiny alternative news channel. You let everybody talk, but you make sure only a few folks are listened to."

"He flashed me a beautiful smile, which made me recall for a moment 1 of the advantages of fame—good-looking groupies."

"It looked strange enough to pass for fashion."

"Making liberty tradable merchandise paves the way to ending independence. Everything becomes a commodity, even freedom."

"But his feelings for me seemed more political than personal. I was a cause, a means by which he could make a name for himself. That hurt."

"Ersatz rights led to ersatz economics—prosthetic loans, junkmoney xFunds, WallaDough, CapitalStinge, Reaganomics."

"I had heard somewhere that dreams didn’t exist the way we remembered them, that we pieced them together from fragments and imposed a story when we woke. It occurred to me that this was the same way we made our lives coherent."

"Hollywood doesn’t want the customer to think, you know what I'm saying?"

"Some of the brilliance of my argument escaped my words. Wind whistled through the logical gaps."

"Everyone wanted a piece of me…And me? What did I want from me? A normal life would have been nice, but I couldn’t even imagine what that was like. Normal had become 1 of those archaic words like thou, spinster, gentleman, decorum."

"The proliferation of weaponry in this country is obscene. But very profitable—capitalism just means moneyism, you know."

"Election integrity is important to me. With what I believe to be relatively small changes, we can make our elections more secure, which should install confidence that everybody's vote matters, because it does."

"I do not have the name recognition that some of the candidates have out there, so every day that goes by before that occurs is a day that is a missed opportunity to work on that."

"God has a great sense of humor about timing. I trust the Lord's timing more than I trust my own."

"The government doesn't create jobs. There are things the government can do to create an environment for jobs. The biggest thing is keeping people away from business is uncertainty that they feel. They don't know what taxes are going to be or what regulatory burden will be there"

"As we all adapt and respond to these unprecedented times, we need to make sure these dollars are put to work and put to work in the best way for Missouri to get back on its feet, put the economy back to work, and get Missouri families moving forward again."

"We shouldn’t be rewarding companies with American tax dollars who use the American capitalist system to achieve billions in profits, but then disown the same history of a country which inherently allowed them to succeed."

"Before becoming a Congressman, I was a small business owner. With that background, I have a better understanding of the hardships small businesses go through when people out in Washington overregulate. It not only harms growth, but it stifles innovation. It has been my goal from day one, and continues to be my goal, to make sure that small businesses continue to be the crux of our nation’s economy."

"We know that fighting to maintain the liberty our forefathers fought and died to secure is paramount. In Missouri, we have always put the rights of individual citizens above the desires of the government. That means freedom to use your private lands for whatever you see fit. And that is why for generations, Missourians have toiled in their bountiful and beautiful fields in America’s heartland, fed a striving nation westward, and produced crops that remain the envy of the world."

"We are the greatest nation on the face of the earth. We are home to the bravest and strongest military who defends freedom around the globe. We respect and honor the rights of the individual versus that of a central government. We believe you should get to wake up each day and decide for yourself what you want to do, not have your decisions dictated to you by the government. Our values, our rights, our freedom and our opportunities are the reason our borders are flooded at this very moment – because millions more wish they could be here, they wish they could be Americans. None of that would have been possible without our history, our story, the American story. I choose not to hide, not to run from that history, but to remember it, to celebrate who we are as Americans today because of where we have been and where we have come."

"The idea of thinking about raising taxes to pay for one of those Obama-style stimulus packages — that has little to do with roads — is obscene, it’s just a spending project."

"When it comes time to vote, we’re going to have to have issues both groups of these folks can support. You can’t give up a vote here and there anymore. You’re going to have to have everybody on the same page. You’re going to have to be more pragmatic. Everybody on the committee’s going to have to be like that. You cannot be an ideologue and be on the committee and expect to get things done. There are just not the votes there to drive things through anymore."

"It is the long game that we have to worry about, but as farmers you know we’re obviously worried about whatever happens in the short term, we’ve got a crop coming up, we don’t know if it’s a bumper crop or not, if it’s a bumper crop it’s going to depress prices but the fact of the matter is commodities are very volatile. In this case the tariffs are going to push it down, they’ll make money on the way down, it will go back up and come back down and come back up, that’s what commodity prices do, it’s just better when they’re a lot higher particularly for farmers who are trying to make farm payments."

"Being vegetarian was easy for me. The hard part was going on the road. The team was always stopping at steakhouses and places where I couldn’t really eat anything. Meat seemed nasty to me because I never had it growing up. But I would end up eating a whole plate of fries, mashed potatoes, or macaroni and cheese instead. At home, my mom would make things that—we would never really know how she made it, but it tasted good, and it was vegetarian. Now, I’ve changed my diet from vegetarian to mostly raw] vegan."

"You Can't Win is (...) an autobiography of a reformed criminal. It points a sufficiently obvious moral, yet one that too many at the present day are prone to forget. A deeper question is also raised, and that is regarding the validity of the practical aims and ideals of the majority of people in our modern world."