Top 140 Herman Wouk Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Herman Wouk

103. “The circle of gleaming green numbers on the black face of the gyroscope compass ticked steadily counterclockwise and the heading increased: 95 degrees, 100, 105, 120, 150. Queeg.”

— Herman Wouk

104. “People who can solve a lot of problems by simply dying are the ones who hang on and on.”

— Herman Wouk

105. “He still had not the slightest understanding of why he had really come; he blamed himself for a late flare of desire crudely masked as a need for advice. He had no way of recognizing the very common impulse of a husband to talk things over with his wife.”

— Herman Wouk

106. “Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end – only at the end it becomes more obvious.”

— Herman Wouk

107. “Germany’s grand aim, he says, must be a Nordic racial alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east.”

— Herman Wouk

108. “The Talmud is not only an encyclopedia of law but a work of folk art, a hymn to the Lord rising out of many generations of men who spent their lives in the quest for him. This quest for God, the confident search for the holy in every busy detail of life, is its grand single theme. The Talmud recaptures a long golden age of intelligence and insight, and it is to this day the circulating heart’s blood of the Jewish religion.”

— Herman Wouk

109. “The last war ruined Germany. Another war will be the absolute end of our country.”

— Herman Wouk

110. “Henry wondered all through the meal whether Warren.”

— Herman Wouk

111. “A democracy in a backward or unstable country simply gets smashed by the best-organized power gang.”

— Herman Wouk

112. “So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it.”

— Herman Wouk

113. “The toiling masses,′ and all that. This country has no toiling masses, we have Dan at the diner and Verne in the mine and Jerry in the steel mill and Burdette at the filling station and so on. They don’t toil, for Christ’s sake, they do a day’s work and then they go home and have a beer. You can’t get them into a mass for anything. If there’s a good ball game on TV they won’t come out to see the president ride by.”

— Herman Wouk

114. “War is politics implemented by the use of force.”

— Herman Wouk

115. “They were invited to fine homes and exclusive clubs. It was a great war.”

— Herman Wouk

116. “Marjorie, darling, listen to me. You know – God knows – you’re not the first girl in my life nor the second, but I swear to you this is new. The reason you’re so crazily in love is that I am, too. There’s no other reason. It happens once in a lifetime to everyone, and I swear to God I’m beginning to think it’s happened for us.”

— Herman Wouk

117. “Albert Speer, Hitler’s astute production chief, is reported to have chided an American Air Force general, after the war, for not laying on more raids like Dresden; it was the sovereign way to end the war, he said, but the Allies failed to follow through.”

— Herman Wouk

118. “The girl you marry and the woman you must make a life with are two different people.”

— Herman Wouk

119. “Duce, damn your whipped-cream soul, do you know anything that can clear up this crazy mess?”

— Herman Wouk

120. “I like novels where the author proves how terrible military guys are, and how superior sensitive civilians are. I know they’re true to life because I’m a sensitive civilian myself.” He puffed at the cigar, made a mouth of distaste, and threw it into a brass jar half full of sand.”

— Herman Wouk

121. “The big bourgeois powers like France, England, and America built their strength and expanded their territory by actions indistinguishable from armed robbery.”

— Herman Wouk

122. “Remember this, if you can – there is nothing, nothing more precious than time.”

— Herman Wouk

123. “He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief. In a world so rich and lovely, could his children find nothing better to do than to dig iron from the ground and work it into vast grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet this madness was the way of the world.”

— Herman Wouk

124. “But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.”

— Herman Wouk

125. “I have a heart of gold. My only faults are that I’m totally selfish and immoral.”

— Herman Wouk

126. “It was going to be a tough ten years, he thought, for men with grown sons. Warren.”

— Herman Wouk

127. “She was, in fact, Katharine Hepburn, playing a store clerk in the first reel of a smart comedy.”

— Herman Wouk

128. “Nothing testified more to the evanescence of position and wealth in Beverly Hills than its architecture. There was money in abundance to put up the settings of the grand life. But land – the one true mark of stable grandeur – was not to be had. The town was an industrial compound of the temporarily well-paid.”

— Herman Wouk

129. “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.”

— Herman Wouk

130. “Morgenstern settled the matter, in her customary way, by going into the kitchen and coming out with a large soup plate from her best china set. She called the couple to the dining-room table, and told them to take hold of the plate and break it on the table. They did so, looking puzzled at each other. The fragments flew all over the floor, and the parents embraced each other, shouting.”

— Herman Wouk

131. “Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He.”

— Herman Wouk

132. “Judd sighed. “I don’t know why people take criticism so seriously. One good creator is worth all the critics who ever lived.” “Criticism is necessary to literature,” Hawke said, and felt a fierce disgust with himself. It was as though he were trying to soothe a homicidal lunatic. Judd said, “Nonsense, criticism is a minor form of entertainment, a sort of piggy-back writing that rides on other men’s work.”

— Herman Wouk

133. “The Caine was a pile of junk in the last hours of decay, manned by hoodlums.”

— Herman Wouk

134. “The British criminals responsible for dropping bombs on women and little children would soon have to face the bar of justice.”

— Herman Wouk

135. “My view is that Hitler and the Nazis have grown out of the heart of German culture – a cancer, maybe, but a uniquely German phenomenon. Some very clever men have given me hell for holding this opinion. They insist the same thing could have happened anywhere, given the same conditions: defeat in a major war, a harsh peace treaty, ruinous inflation, mass unemployment, communism on the march, anarchy in the streets – all leading to the rise of a demagogue, and a reign of terror.”

— Herman Wouk

136. “Barak later reported to Pasternak, that he might one day be the government spokesman in Jerusalem.”

— Herman Wouk

137. “Rothmore rasped, “Do you think an IQ is something real, like a nose? It’s a... number dreamed up by... psychologists, and all it proves is that farmers aren’t as smart as psychologists. If the farmers had enough time to wast to make up an IQ system, the psychologists would all come out morons and the farmers geniuses.”

— Herman Wouk

138. “Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President’s. Some people had it, some didn’t. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was “grease.” Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.”

— Herman Wouk

139. “The Germans were the bad children of Europe, Jastrow argued: egotistic, willful, romantic, always poised to break up faltering patterns of order. Arminius had set the ax to the Pax Romana; Martin Luther had broken the back of the universal Church; now Hitler was challenging Europe’s unsteady regime of liberal capitalism, based on an obsolete patchwork structure of nations.”

— Herman Wouk

140. “None of the authorities have experienced the worst of enough typhoons to make airtight generalizations. None of the authorities, moreover, are anxious to acquire the experience. The.”

— Herman Wouk

141. “It’s a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They’re hobbled by their paper shufflers, like all politicians. More so, in a way.”

— Herman Wouk

142. “I’ve given up. This ship is an outcast, manned by outcasts, and named for the great outcast of mankind. My destiny is the Caine. It’s the purgatory for my sins.” “Any interesting sins, Tom?”

— Herman Wouk

143. “War has always been violent blindman’s buff, played with men’s lives and nations’ resources. But the time for it is over. As the race has outgrown human sacrifice, human slavery, and duelling, it has to outgrow war.”

— Herman Wouk

144. “Look at a politician, eighty years old, making a speech to a crowd in the rain. What’s driving him? Not ambition. He’s been a senator for forty years. He can never be anything more. But by winning this election he can have one more Hit. He’d rather die of pneumonia than risk missing the Hit.”

— Herman Wouk

145. “If you want to know, what I’ve studied seems to me a lot of rubbish. The rules, the lingo, strike me as comical. The idea of men spending their lives in this make-believe appalls me. I used to think it was preferable to the Army, but I’m sure now that they’re both the same kind of foolishness. I don’t care. I picked the Navy. I’ll see this stupid war through in the Navy.”

— Herman Wouk

146. “I have found out what it’s like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn’t realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn’t automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply.”

— Herman Wouk

147. “Individually the Germans were remarkably like Americans; he thought it curious that both peoples had the eagle for their national emblem. The Germans were the same sort of businesslike go-getters: direct, roughly humorous, and usually reliable and able.”

— Herman Wouk