Top 120 Herman Wouk Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Marjorie, your lack of self-knowledge is fabulous. Being a Jew is your whole life. Good Lord, you don’t eat bacon. I’ve seen you shove it off your plate as though it were a dead mouse.” “Well, I can’t help that, it’s habit.” Noel shook.”

— Herman Wouk

52. “It was like the hate of a husband for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreakable tie to a loathsome person, and existing not as a self-justification, but for the rotten gleam of pleasure it gave off in the continuing gloom. Out.”

— Herman Wouk

53. “Please tell Field Marshal Goring for me, to stick his Swiss bank account up his fat ass.”

— Herman Wouk

54. “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

55. “What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear, in the way that best honors one’s intelligence and one’s birth. Part 2 THE FAITH.”

— Herman Wouk

56. “This is an excellent martini – sort of tastes like it isn’t there at all, just a cold cloud.”

— Herman Wouk

57. “Al nations celebrate the day of their coming into being with a work stoppage and ceremonies. The Jews, who believe that God created the universe, celebrate its coming into being, and give thanks to its Maker, once a week.”

— Herman Wouk

58. “I almost died, and I realized that all I regretted was you.”

— Herman Wouk

59. “See, the Germans aren’t kidding about the Jews. They’re cooking us down to soap over there. They think we’re vermin and should be ’sterminated and our corpses turned into something useful.”

— Herman Wouk

60. “The trouble started one morning when there was a fog.”

— Herman Wouk

61. “The will not to believe. It is simple human nature. When the mind cannot grasp or face up to a horrible fact it turns away, as though refusing credence will conjure away the reality.”

— Herman Wouk

62. “All the corpses must be brought back from the work site for the evening roll call, since the count of living and dead has to match the number of men who left in the morning, to establish that nobody has escaped Auschwitz except by dying.”

— Herman Wouk

63. “You can’t assume a goddamned thing in this Navy.”

— Herman Wouk

64. “Cabs, cabs! Why did God give you feet? Walk me to Fiftieth.”

— Herman Wouk

65. “Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.”

— Herman Wouk

66. “Marjorie, my sweet, we’ve fallen in love with each other, that’s all. You love me. I love you. Don’t lose any sleep over it.” Electric stings ran through her arms and legs. She put.”

— Herman Wouk

67. “The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: ‘Don’t kill; don’t be vile; don’t steal; don’t tell lies about others; don’t envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.’ This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of “Thou Shalt Nots” is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing.”

— Herman Wouk

68. “He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star, and for the moment it was enough to be where she was.”

— Herman Wouk

69. “Oaths, blasphemies, and one recurring four-letter word filled the air like fog.”

— Herman Wouk

70. “By keeping back the twenty-five squadrons from the lost Battle of France, he acted toughly, wisely, and ungallantly; and he turned the war to the course that ended five long years later, when Hitler killed himself and Nazi Germany fell apart. This deed put Winston Churchill in the company of the rare saviors of countries, and perhaps of civilizations.”

— Herman Wouk

71. “The President has a quick and able mind, though not everybody gives him that, not by a long shot.”

— Herman Wouk

72. “When you’re at the bottom, there’s no place to go but up,” said.”

— Herman Wouk

73. “Either war is finished, or we are.”

— Herman Wouk

74. “I think appreciating Dickens goes with ten thousand in the bank.”

— Herman Wouk

75. “I think it’s a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot’s in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren’t fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can’t be far off.”

— Herman Wouk

76. “Parlor talk seems to me on much more promising ground worrying over conformity than gnawing the bones of Freud.”

— Herman Wouk

77. “This country of ours consists of pioneers, after.”

— Herman Wouk

78. “22 Emily’s Letters After the Suez fiasco, Great Britain and France were no longer serious players in the Middle East, and Israel was tarred as their co-conspirator in a failed last gasp of imperialism.”

— Herman Wouk

79. “We transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs who.”

— Herman Wouk

80. “You’re not supposed to love Jews necessarily, just to give them a fair shake.”

— Herman Wouk

81. “Extremism, he says, is the universal tuberculosis of modern society: a world infection of resentment and hatred generated by rapid change and the breakdown of old values. In the stabler nations the tubercles are sealed off in scar tissue, and these are the harmless lunatic movements. In times of social disorder, depression, war, or revolution, the germs can break forth and infect the nation. This has happened in Germany. It could happen anywhere, even in the United States.”

— Herman Wouk

82. “Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and.”

— Herman Wouk

83. “Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.”

— Herman Wouk

84. “Religious discipline is nothing but a permanent psychic shelter. You stay inside it, and you’re less vulnerable to whatever horrors happen in life.”

— Herman Wouk

85. “If you’re not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.”

— Herman Wouk

86. “Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize – the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.”

— Herman Wouk

87. “To sum up: whatever fictional liberties have been taken in weaving the phantoms of my invention through real events, The Hope is presented to my readers as an honest account of Israel’s early history, as true and responsible as research could make it. As to whether the tale itself pleases, only they can judge.”

— Herman Wouk

88. “South Wind had been, in Marjorie’s visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last find herself and be herself – clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word, it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar.”

— Herman Wouk

89. “The UN is all screams and twitters, like a ladies’ room when a guy barges in. A.”

— Herman Wouk

90. “Phil’s a slow-thinking sort, so I usually tied him up. He’s one of the few communists I’ve ever been able to stand. They’re like the abolitionists. Their cause may be just, but their personalities are repulsive. I don’t really know whether they’re right or not, and I don’t care.”

— Herman Wouk

91. “What did they care if the rabbis who found them with the books of haskala, of enlightenment, called them epicureans, atheists, breakers of the wall? These old epithets they began to take as names of honor. Out of their ranks came the minds and spirits that created modern Zionism. The fact that Zionism was cradled against the separatist learning of the old yeshivas colors the state of Israel to this hour.”

— Herman Wouk

92. “What is his basic premise? That everyone on the Caine is a liar, a traitor, and a funk-off, so that the ship can only function if he constantly nags and spies and threatens and screeches and hands out draconic punishments. Now, how do you go about proving that his premise is wrong?” “You.”

— Herman Wouk

93. “The lesson was writ plain by Thucydides centuries before Christ was born. Democracy satisfies best the human thirst for freedom; yet, being undisciplined, turbulent, and luxury-seeking, it falls time and again to austere single-minded despotism.”

— Herman Wouk

94. “Neville did a remarkable simulation of running in fourteen directions at once, whimpering, screeching, and snapping his teeth. The seder stopped.”

— Herman Wouk

95. “Well, normality, you know, is a fiction in psychiatry. It’s all relative. No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.”

— Herman Wouk

96. “And my revulsion wasn’t against your religion, but all religions. They’re all more or less alike. You can’t blame the human race for preferring some bright storyteller’s dream or other to the black cold meaningless dark of the real universe.”

— Herman Wouk

97. “Tocqueville long ago marked as the great weakness of a democracy in his unforgettable phrase, “the tyranny of the majority.” The pressure to emulate neighbors, the urge to conform to popular views and manners, the deep fear of being different.”

— Herman Wouk

98. “Teuton, and there are some eighty million of them, I regret to say. Run.”

— Herman Wouk

99. “This particular argument was pleasanter than most, because the person setting me straight was a pretty seventeen-year-old girl, a college sophomore, and it was no strain to smile at her with good humor as she went about her work.”

— Herman Wouk

100. “In our own tradition, and on the basis of the words of Hebrew Scripture, there is not the faintest doubt that Moses is not only the source of Judaism under God, but its high reach as well.”

— Herman Wouk