Michael Dobbs · 384 pages
Rating: (2.5K votes)
“The captain of the Lowry tried a new approach. He assembled the destroyer’s jazz band on deck, and told them to play some music. Strains of Yankee Doodle floated across the ocean, followed by a boogie-woogie number. The Americans thought they could see a smile on the face of one of the sailors. They asked if there was any particular tune he would like to hear. The Soviet sailor did not respond. The”
― Michael Dobbs, quote from One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
“The most enduring lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is that, in a world with nuclear weapons, a classic military victory is an illusion. Communism was not defeated militarily; it was defeated economically, culturally, and ideologically. Khrushchev’s successors were unable to provide their own people with a basic level of material prosperity and spiritual fulfillment. They lost the war of ideas. In the end, as I have argued in Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, communism defeated itself.”
― Michael Dobbs, quote from One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
“JFK's great virtue, and the essential difference between him and George W. Bush, was that he had an instinctive appreciation for the chaotic forces of history.”
― Michael Dobbs, quote from One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
“Bismarck defined political intuition as the ability to hear, before anybody else, “the distant hoofbeats of history.”
― Michael Dobbs, quote from One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
“The closest contact they had with the enemy was a playful sign that boasted: “Worldwide delivery in 30 minutes or less—or your next one is free.” Nuclear apocalypse was as mundane as delivering pizza.”
― Michael Dobbs, quote from One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
“Khrushchev had been ready to settle for a”
― Michael Dobbs, quote from One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War
Michael Dobbs
Born place: in Belfast, The United Kingdom
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“No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.”
― Susan Sontag, quote from Regarding the Pain of Others
“Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as “Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental.” A 60 percent (or whatever) “heritability” for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the “interactionism” we all accept does not permit such statements as “Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic.” When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that being’s behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, quote from The Mismeasure of Man
“It's that magnificent interlude in New York between winter and spring, when you feel the warmth stirring, and you remember that the dreadful naked trees will inevitably sprout tiny green buds, soon. Everyone rushes into the parks, the streets--and you even forget that, very soon , summer will come scorchingly, dropping from the sky like a blanket of steam...”
― John Rechy, quote from City of Night
“The grand highway is crowded with lovers
and searchers
and leavers
so eager to please, and to forget. Wilderness”
― Jim Morrison, quote from Wilderness: The Lost Writings, Vol. 1
“Train your children to use occasions when hurt to learn how to love God and deepen their trust and confidence in him.”
― quote from Shepherding a Child's Heart
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