Stan Goff Quotes

#1. I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN's Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command.

Stan Goff

#2. Remember that Caligula was not a cause, he was an effect.

Stan Goff

#3. Young professionals, I reminded myself, sympathetic as they may seem with a disarming modesty, are always necessarily invested in conservatism.

Stan Goff

#4. The academic is sharing in the bourgeois' loot, in a hundred little ways. And the peasant understands necessity as something that transcends mortality. To be in community with that peasant, the Chapel Hill academic will have to commit class suicide.

Stan Goff

#5. Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project.

Stan Goff

#6. Stupidity is a tough, fecund thing, like crabgrass.

Stan Goff

#7. It's always easier to pretend you know something than it is to learn about it. It's always easier to be cute than it is to be rigorous. It is easier to talk trash than it is to practice the humility of the serious student.

Stan Goff

#8. The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti.

Stan Goff

#9. Uniforms standardize the way we recognize military members who outrank us, so we can avoid ass chewings for failure to refer to someone as sergeant or sir or your majesty, or for failure to salute them.

Stan Goff

#10. Race was an issue because in every assignment I have had in Special Operations, racism has been as much a part of the social bond as football and fast cars. I never cared for either of them either, but this was special.

Stan Goff

#11. I felt small, like one does when the distance between stars occasionally asserts itself into your understanding, like when your own death's inevitability leaps in front of you in the middle of the night when you get up to pee.

Stan Goff

#12. If being a perfect soldier meant continuing to follow any fucking order I was given, then I would have to settle for being a mediocre soldier.

Stan Goff

#13. Politics is economics by other means, and war is politics by other means.

Stan Goff

#14. War technology is science in the service of obscene anatomical vandalism.

Stan Goff

#15. Racism - if you look closely - is about profit. The whole system was built on it. War - if you look closely - is about profit. Poverty, which is not, and never has been, an accident - if you look closely - is about profit.

Stan Goff

#16. It's the same hope we have to hold for humanity - that we can transform our roles, roles constructed like so many doors for us to go through by history, and by and by transform the whole edifice of human relations.

Stan Goff

#17. When you are massively outgunned, you do not fire and give away your position.

Stan Goff

#18. I think we are all about to become rootless. It may be time. The soil has become poisonous.

Stan Goff

#19. George W. Bush committed impeachable offenses in waging war in Iraq.

Stan Goff

#20. People who claim, for example, that capitalism can overcome its dependence on fossil fuel have either not researched the question or they are on mescaline.

Stan Goff

#21. The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman ... Every soldier is the same fallible breed of human that we are. The making of war, even the most necessary and 'just' war, hardens human hearts.

Stan Goff

#22. But paranoids might have real enemies and obsessives might obsess about really important stuff.

Stan Goff

#23. That sounds stupid, but people have to remember that being raised a white male in the U.S.in the fifties and sixties, for most of us, meant being raised stupid.

Stan Goff

#24. The dialectical movement of economics, politics, and military power is folding and swirling like weather. Politics is being reshaped by military failure. Military failure is being shaped by economics.

Stan Goff

#25. I've never actually seen the military used to any higher moral purpose. There is always the bottom line, somewhere, somehow.

Stan Goff