Presbyterians From The United States

"No one thought in all the world is of more value to put life and cheer and power into a man than the thought that the great Being who made this universe is FOR us and not AGAINST US."

"No man can tell what the whisper says. Each soul must hear for itself."

"Go into the silence. Give your soul time to calm. Let the hurly-burly die down, the crash of passion, the struggle of doubt, the pain of failure, the ranklings of wrong, the clamor of ambition. Cease from self. Be still."

"God always whispers. At least to the soul. He may thunder to nations and speak to armies in the lightning. But to the individual His message is not in the mighty wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, but in the still, small voice."

"How to value my own self-esteem more than the praise of others."

"How to get along with relatives and all those persons with whom I come in contact."

"How to handle enemies and those who wrong or offend me."

"How to make friends and keep them."

"How to control my sex instinct so as to make it conduce my permanent happiness and not to disease, mental misery, and the wrecking of my career."

"How to get stimulation out of simple food and water drink, and not alcohol."

"How to be a good fellow without being a fool."

"How to work so as to make work a pleasure."

"How to play fair."

"How to curb my selfishness and develop my altruism."

"How to find pleasure in common things."

"How to improve and toughen my will."

"How to use my imagination so as to strengthen me instead of making me weak."

"How to control my temper."

"Better than big business is clean business. To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean. What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while. "A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow." This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty. Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare. That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money. That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong. And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions. The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar.<brAnd the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society. Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work."

"Nobilities, indecencies, heroic impulses, cowardly ravings, good and bad, white and black &mdash; the mystery of mysteries, the central island of nescience in a sea of science, the dark spot in the lighted room of knowledge, the unknown quantity, the X in the universal problem."

"Bend close! You will smell the lily fragrance of love, the stench of lust, now odors as exquisite as the very spirit of violets, and now such nauseous repulsions as words cannot tell."

"Listen! You will hear mothers' lullabies, madmen's shrieks, love-croonings, cries of agonized terror, hymns of Christ, the roaring of lynch mobs, the kisses of lovers, the curses of pirates."

"The human heart is the throne of God, the council-chamber of the devil, the dwelling of angels, the vile heath of witches' Sabbaths, the nursery of sweet children, the blood-spattered scene of nameless tragedies."

"The human heart is a cup of love, where some find life and zest, and some drunkenness and death."

"The human heart to youth is a fairy-land of adventure, to old age it is a sitting room where one knows his way in the dark."

"The human heart is a great city, teeming with myriad people, full of business and mighty doings, and we wander its crowded streets unutterably alone; we do not know what it is all about."

"The human heart is a band playing in a park at a distance; we see the crowds listening, but we catch but fragments of the music now and again, and cannot make out the tune."

"The human heart is a meadow full of fireflies, a summer western sky of shimmering distant lightnings, a shore set round with flashing lighthouses, far-away voices calling that we cannot understand."

"The human heart is a garden, wherein grow weeds of memory and blooms of hope, and the snow falls at last and covers all."

"The human heart is a roaring forge where night and day the smiths are busy fashioning swords and silver cups, mitres and engine-wheels, the tools of *labor, and the gauds of precedence."

"The human heart is a tangled wood wherein no man knows his way."

"The human heart is an egg; and out of it are hatched this world and heaven and hell."

"The human heart is an undiscovered country; men and women are forever perishing as they explore its wilds."

"The human heart is a deep still pool; in it are fishes of gold and silver, darting playfully, and slow-heaving slimy monsters, and tarnished treasure hoards, the infinite animalcular life; but when you look down at it you see but your own reflected face."

"The human heart is a great green tree, and many strange birds come and sing in its branches; a few build nests, but most are from far lands north and south, and never come again."

"The human heart is a lonely lane in the evening, and two lovers are walking down it, whispering and lingering."

"The human heart is a wide moor under a dull sky, with voices of invisible birds calling in the distance."

"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough."

"In early July, Alain Enthoven had arranged for me to have a brief luncheon with McNamara, to discuss my work on the guidance to the JCS on the war plan, which he had already approved and sent to the Chiefs. We ate at his desk, in his office. It was scheduled to last only half an hour, but it went on nearly an hour longer. I told him about the astonishing answers the JCS had given to the questions I had drafted in the name of the president, in particular about the effects they anticipated on our own European allies from their planned attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc. I’d had no prior intention to bring up my own strongly heretical view on first use, but midway through our talk, he raised the issue himself. There was no such thing as limited nuclear war in Europe, he said. “It would be total war, total annihilation, for the Europeans!” He said this with great passion, belying his reputation as a cold, computer-like efficiency expert. Moreover, he thought it was absurd to suppose that a supposedly “limited use” would remain limited to Europe, that it would not quickly trigger general nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union, to disastrous effect. I’ve never had a stronger sense in another person of a kindred awareness of this situation and intensity of his concern to change it. Thirty years later, McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances whatever should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn’t tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said at this lunch. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice, and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the mad “assurances” on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials (including speeches I drafted for him) throughout his years in office, as the very basis for our leadership in the alliance."

"Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests, that the United States is, or should or could be the global gendarme."

"I would rather have a wrong decision made than no decision at all."

"Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society."

"I must say I don't object to its being called McNamara's War. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it."

"[...]Mắc Na-ma-ra Mày trốn đâu? Giữa bãi tha ma Của toà nhà năm góc Mỗi góc một châu Mày vẫn chui đầu Trong lửa nóng Như đà điểu rúc đầu trong cát bỏng.[...]"

"We're also here to ask -- We are here to ask and we're here to ask vehemently, Where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask: Where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric, and so many others. Where are they now that we the men whom they sent off to war have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations, bleaching behind them in the sun in this country."

"McNamara, characteristically, transformed this reliance on irrationality into a new kind of rationality in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. He now repudiated his earlier ideas of targeting only military facilities: instead each side should target the other’s cities, with a view of causing the maximum number of casualties possible. The new strategy became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction”—its acronym, with wicked appropriateness, was MAD. The assumption behind it was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one. That, however, was simply a restatement of what Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather, the survival of states required that there be no war at all."

"McNamara became a strong advocate of a Keynesian approach to government, using mathematical models and statistical approaches to determine troop levels, allocation of funds, and other strategies in Vietnam. His advocacy of "aggressive leadership" became a hallmark not only of government managers but also of corporate executives. It formed the basis of a new philosophical approach to teaching management at the nation's top business schools, and it ultimately led to a new breed of CEOs who would spearhead the rush to global empire... As we sat around the table discussing world events, we were especially fascinated by McNamara's role as president of the World Bank, a job he accepted soon after leaving his post as secretary of defense. Most of my friends focused on the fact that he symbolized what was popularly known as the military-industrial complex. He had held the top position in a major corporation, in a government cabinet, and now at the most powerful bank in the world. Such an apparent breach in the separation of powers horrified many of them; I may have been the only one among us who was not in the least surprised... I see now that Robert McNamara's greatest and most sinister contribution to history was to jockey the World Bank into becoming an agent of global empire on a scale never before witnessed. He also set a precedent. His ability to bridge the gaps between the primary components of the corporatocracy would be fine-tuned by his successors."

"Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. Lesson #10: Never say never. Lesson #11: You can't change human nature..."

"It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it, necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives."

"You can never substitute emotion for reason. I still would allow a place for intuition in this process, but not emotion. They say I am a power gabber. But knowledge is power, and I am giving them knowledge, so they will have more power. Can't they see that?"