Best 43 quotes of Herman Wouk on MyQuotes

About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.

A leader can't dash ahead around the bend out of sight.

A writer is nothing but a gray dirt-covered root. The works he sends up into the sunlight are his fruits, and only those are worthy of attention.

Discount my partiality, but my report is that so far The Winds of War is looking good.

Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don't think so now you will later on, more and more.

Human life cannot be formless. We live by patterns. We move in comradeships. Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu - and a recognizable part - unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return. The sensible thing is to use hard thinking to find the right way to live and then to live that way. What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear.

I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.

Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off.

I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

Let us fill a cup and drink to that most noble, ridiculous, laughable, sublime figure in our lives... The Young Man Who Was. Let us drink to his dreams, for they were rainbow-colored; to his appetites, for they were strong; to his blunders, for they were huge; to his pains for they were sharp; to his time for it was brief; and to his end, for it was to become one of us.

My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.

Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth.

Strange, isn't it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.

... talk, not sex, constitutes most of the intercourse between a man and his wife.

The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history.

The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.

The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, "How would I do this if I were a fool?" Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.

The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.

The President has a quick and able mind, though not everybody gives him that, not by a long shot.

The Talmud: Heart's Blood of the Jewish Faith.

The Talmud is to this day the circulating heart's blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever laws, customs or ceremonies we observe-whether we are orthodox, conservative, reform or merely spasmodic sentimentalists-we follow the Talmud. It is our common Law.

This is an excellent martini — sort of tastes like it isn't there at all, just a cold cloud.

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Write a page a day. It will add up.

Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.

He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room. The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.

In a solemn tone, like a priest chanting a mass, beating time in the air with a stiff finger, Slote quoted: " 'The German Revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the Critique of Kant, by the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte.  These doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces  that only await their time to break forth.  Christianity subdued the brutal warrior passion of the Germans, but it could not quench it. When the Cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then  will break forth again the frantic Berserker rage.  The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries.  Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.' " Slote made an awkward, weak gesture with a fist to represent a hammerblow, and went on: " 'Smile not at the dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and the other philosophers.  Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect.  The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder.  German thunder is of true German character.  It is not very nimble but rumbles along somewhat slowly.  But come it will. And when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen.' "Heine - the Jew who composed the greatest German poetry, and who fell in love with German philosophy - Heine wrote that," Slote said in a quieter tone. "He wrote that a hundred and six years ago.

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.

No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.

Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours; there is no life without them.

She had learned from her encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world-the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls.

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.

The will not to believe. It is simple human nature. When the mind cannot grasp or face up to a horrible fact it turns away, as though refusing credence will conjure away the reality.

When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.