James Stockdale

“In order to do something you must be something.”

“I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, F-8 Crusaders.”

“Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy.”

“On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.”

“This idea, as you know, that I have firm convictions that the idea of issues being a big deal where our mutual friend went back and he felt so strongly that the determining factor in electoral success should be a proven character.”

“Sybil's my wife, and on the first day of October, that's the first time I knew Ross was going to run.”

“So the first thing that went on was to decide... trying to find a time when we could get reprisal raids out.”

“We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film.”

“There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.”

“They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.”

“They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.”

“And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.”

“Half the issues they - are so polished they're talking about - are dead by the time they get into the office, and into the midst of their tour where they're really productive.”

“I think character is permanent, and issues are transient.”

“The guy that just arranges things so that the stock market holds up is nobody in my - in my estimation.”

“I was tortured fifteen times, that's total submission. They did that with shutting off your blood circulation with ropes, giving you claustrophobia and pain at the same time, bending you double.”

“I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - there are probably a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do.”

“And so, I mean, he declared war right there and then in so many words and Alex says later in the book, nobody in the White House from that point on had any doubt that we were going to bomb the mainland of Asia.”

“But there were highs as well as lows, it was as though they said everybody was picking on the man who had more practical real life experiences than the whole batch of them put together.”

“I mean, I didn't - I should have demanded attention of the boss maybe, or something like that that might have backfired. This I would just take as it came.”