Philip Caputo Quotes

#1. Aside from their companionship, I'd brought Sage and Sky as ambassadors, hoping they would attract attention and open the door to conversations with strangers. In a moment, they fulfilled their diplomatic function.

Philip Caputo

#2. Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

Philip Caputo

#3. I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war ... suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

Philip Caputo

#4. The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

Philip Caputo

#5. In wartime, the degree of patriotism is directly proportional to distance from the front.

Philip Caputo

#6. Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it ... the lamp of conviction needs to be shaded by doubt, or it burns with a blinding light.

Philip Caputo

#7. What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland). The

Philip Caputo

#8. The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature.

Philip Caputo

#9. And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.

Philip Caputo

#10. It's paradoxical that the death of your quarry is besides the point and at the same time the whole point. A chase without a kill as its object is like a journey without a destination; a kill without a chase employing all the hunter's craft is killing, not hunting.

Philip Caputo

#11. War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

Philip Caputo

#12. As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself.

Philip Caputo

#13. I'm a Midwesterner by birth, and when I traveled there, when I was young, most of the small towns were thriving, vibrant places.

Philip Caputo

#14. In a guerrilla war, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier is permitted to shoot at any human target, armed or unarmed, further confuse the fighting man's moral senses.

Philip Caputo