Top 120 Herman Wouk Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

— Herman Wouk

2. “This life is slow suicide, unless you read.”

— Herman Wouk

3. “Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.”

— Herman Wouk

4. “The Talmud is to this day the circulating heart’s blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever laws, customs or ceremonies we observe-whether we are orthodox, conservative, reform or merely spasmodic sentimentalists-we follow the Talmud. It is our common Law.”

— Herman Wouk

5. “Remember this, if you can – there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven’t. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end – only at the end it becomes more obvious. Use your time while you have it, Willie, in making something of yourself.”

— Herman Wouk

6. “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.”

— Herman Wouk

7. “Discount my partiality, but my report is that so far The Winds of War is looking good.”

— Herman Wouk

8. “Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.”

— Herman Wouk

9. “The Talmud: Heart’s Blood of the Jewish Faith...”

— Herman Wouk

10. “War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn’t them.”

— Herman Wouk

11. “We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.”

— Herman Wouk

12. “Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.”

— Herman Wouk

13. “Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.”

— Herman Wouk

14. “I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.”

— Herman Wouk

15. “Judaism takes the verse in Genesis, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ as part of its statutory law. Because it is the first law in the Torah it holds a special eminence.”

— Herman Wouk

16. “Write a page a day. It will add up.”

— Herman Wouk

17. “It’s not money, but what you can buy with it. Money is power. Money is security. Money is freedom.”

— Herman Wouk

18. “You can’t understand command till you’ve had it. It’s the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It’s a nightmare, unless you’re an ox. You’re forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes.”

— Herman Wouk

19. “Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most.”

— Herman Wouk

20. “He’s too clever to be wise, if that makes any sense. Very.”

— Herman Wouk

21. “The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history.”

— Herman Wouk

22. “Strange, isn’t it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.”

— Herman Wouk

23. “Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.”

— Herman Wouk

24. “The clear intent of our law is to enable a man to live in the world and yet hold his faith close to his daily thoughts.”

— Herman Wouk

25. “My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.”

— Herman Wouk

26. “I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.”

— Herman Wouk

27. “A writer is nothing but a gray dirt-covered root. The works he sends up into the sunlight are his fruits, and only those are worthy of attention.”

— Herman Wouk

28. “About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He’s proud of it, too. The Bible’s full of kind remarks about booze.”

— Herman Wouk

29. “But war is no respecter of limits, it is by definition harsh and inhuman, and there is no preparing for it.”

— Herman Wouk

30. “Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.”

— Herman Wouk

31. “The Jewish Sabbath may be too hard for some people, or they may not subscribe to its ideas; but within its own terms it is a dramatic ceremony penetrating all of life. It is not simply a day off. This demanding rite turns twenty-four hours of every week into a separated time, apart in mood, texture, acts, and events from daily existence.”

— Herman Wouk

32. “The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.”

— Herman Wouk

33. “The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.”

— Herman Wouk

34. “It’s occurred to me that our human values, our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, evolved in simpler times, before there were machines.”

— Herman Wouk

35. “Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu – and a recognizable part – unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return.”

— Herman Wouk

36. “The reason for the prosperity of the wicked, and also for the troubles of the good, is not in our hands.” Then.”

— Herman Wouk

37. “Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth.”

— Herman Wouk

38. “I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.”

— Herman Wouk

39. “Can’t stop a Nazi with a lawbook.”

— Herman Wouk

40. “Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don’t think so now you will later on, more and more.”

— Herman Wouk

41. “In Judaism praying for benefits is a very small part of the liturgy. Most of it is commitment of one’s fortunes to God, and meditation on sacred writings which put in clear words the few great points of our religion. Its daily aim is a renewal of religious energy through an act which declares one’s Jewish identity and one’s hope in the Lord.”

— Herman Wouk

42. “A leader can’t dash ahead around the bend out of sight.”

— Herman Wouk

43. “There are good and bad things in all political systems.”

— Herman Wouk

44. “Money is a very pleasant thing, Willie, and I think you can trade almost anything for it wisely except the work you really want to do. If you sell out your time for a comfortable life, and give up your natural work, I think you lose the exchange. There remains an inner uneasiness that spoils the comforts.”

— Herman Wouk

45. “No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.”

— Herman Wouk

46. “For the rest the Navy is a third-rate career for third-rate people, offering a sort of skimpy security in return for twenty or thirty years of a polite penal servitude.”

— Herman Wouk

47. “Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours; there is no life without them.”

— Herman Wouk

48. “A Talmud saying implies that in Messianic times the sacrifices will not be resumed in the restored Temple, except for the thank offerings.”

— Herman Wouk

49. “I felt there’s a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I’d be a jerk not to take advantage of it.”

— Herman Wouk

50. “Aye aye, sir.” Willie saluted and emerged into the sunlight, through the one loophole that military wisdom can never quite button up – the sympathy of the downtrodden for each other.”

— Herman Wouk