People with new ideas, or those who step out of the popular line of thought, have always been lambasted as crackpots and radicals. Sometimes they have been exactly that, but quite often they have accomplished great things, and certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.
Quotations by:
Mauldin, Bill
I have heard people say we should be strong so that if there is another war we can win it, then show the world the right way to live afterward. This is old stuff, and it is poppycock. Our behavior hardly qualifies us as world leaders. Ours is one of the most conservative governments in the world today, and one of the most bumbling. We have more provincialism and bigotry and superstition and prejudice per square mile than almost any other nation. We like to think of ourselves as a young, progressive country, but, while we do have energy, we have become smug and self-satisfied.
No normal man who has smelled and associated with death ever wants to see any more of it. In fact, the only men who are even going to want to bloody noses in a fist fight after this war will be those who want people to think they were tough combat men, when they weren’t. The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.
I don’t make the infantryman look noble, because he couldn’t look noble even if he tried. Still there is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers and medical aid men with dirt in their ears. They are rough and their language gets coarse because they live a life stripped of convention and niceties. Their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other.
Law and order is like patriotism — anyone who comes on strong about patriotism has got something to hide — it never fails. They always turn out to be a crook or an asshole or a traitor or something.
Bill Mauldin (1921-2003) American editorial cartoonist, writer
Interview by Donald R. Katz, “Bill Mauldin: Drawing Fire,” Rolling Stone (4 Nov 1976)
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