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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“I decide this is just A Bad Day. We all get them, because grief doesn't care how many years it's been.”
― Sara Barnard, quote from A Quiet Kind of Thunder
“Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumour of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire across such a cloudless heaven?”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Flappers and Philosophers
“And, as for the oil, it is a masterpiece. You’ll see.”
Before dinner that night, we tested it, dripping it onto slices of bread that had been rubbed with the flesh of tomatoes. It was like eating sunshine.”
― Peter Mayle, quote from A Year in Provence
“Happy is one of the many things I'm likely to be over the course of a day and certainly over the course of a lifetime. But I think if you have the expectation that you're going to be happy throughout your life--more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time--well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.”
― Carrie Fisher, quote from Wishful Drinking
“From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o’clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.”
― Jack London, quote from The People of the Abyss
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