Stan Goff Quotes & Sayings

War technology is science in the service of obscene anatomical vandalism. — Stan Goff

The appearance of precision and order are so important to military commanders because they are generally idiots who couldn't plan a decent cocktail party, especially the bureaucrats who float to the top of the Officer Personnel Management System. They require the appearance of precision and order because their operations, this one being emblematic, are goat fucks. — Stan Goff

The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman ... Every soldier is the same fallible breed of human that we are. The making of war, even the most necessary and 'just' war, hardens human hearts. — Stan Goff

Young professionals, I reminded myself, sympathetic as they may seem with a disarming modesty, are always necessarily invested in conservatism. — Stan Goff

I've never actually seen the military used to any higher moral purpose. There is always the bottom line, somewhere, somehow. — Stan Goff

Racism - if you look closely - is about profit. The whole system was built on it. War - if you look closely - is about profit. Poverty, which is not, and never has been, an accident - if you look closely - is about profit. — Stan Goff

Remember that Caligula was not a cause, he was an effect. — Stan Goff

It's always easier to pretend you know something than it is to learn about it. It's always easier to be cute than it is to be rigorous. It is easier to talk trash than it is to practice the humility of the serious student. — Stan Goff

Stupidity is a tough, fecund thing, like crabgrass. — Stan Goff

When you are massively outgunned, you do not fire and give away your position. — Stan Goff

People who claim, for example, that capitalism can overcome its dependence on fossil fuel have either not researched the question or they are on mescaline. — Stan Goff

If being a perfect soldier meant continuing to follow any fucking order I was given, then I would have to settle for being a mediocre soldier. — Stan Goff

The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti. — Stan Goff

Race was an issue because in every assignment I have had in Special Operations, racism has been as much a part of the social bond as football and fast cars. I never cared for either of them either, but this was special. — Stan Goff

I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN's Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command. — Stan Goff

George W. Bush committed impeachable offenses in waging war in Iraq. — Stan Goff

But paranoids might have real enemies and obsessives might obsess about really important stuff. — Stan Goff

Politics is economics by other means, and war is politics by other means. — Stan Goff

The academic is sharing in the bourgeois' loot, in a hundred little ways. And the peasant understands necessity as something that transcends mortality. To be in community with that peasant, the Chapel Hill academic will have to commit class suicide. — Stan Goff

Uniforms standardize the way we recognize military members who outrank us, so we can avoid ass chewings for failure to refer to someone as sergeant or sir or your majesty, or for failure to salute them. — Stan Goff

That sounds stupid, but people have to remember that being raised a white male in the U.S.in the fifties and sixties, for most of us, meant being raised stupid. — Stan Goff

It's the same hope we have to hold for humanity - that we can transform our roles, roles constructed like so many doors for us to go through by history, and by and by transform the whole edifice of human relations. — Stan Goff

The dialectical movement of economics, politics, and military power is folding and swirling like weather. Politics is being reshaped by military failure. Military failure is being shaped by economics. — Stan Goff

American culture is a sheep culture - long on talk about individualism, but even longer on absolute conformity. Most still believe that individuality is based on which model car you like best - commodity identity, a selection of personalities on a shelf full of products approved by the Federal Identity Administration. I'm a Taurus aspiring to be a Lexus. — Stan Goff

I think we are all about to become rootless. It may be time. The soil has become poisonous. — Stan Goff

So here I am, a white man telling Black children to not give white people the benefit of the doubt. It's not prejudice I'm giving them, it's survival. Don't talk to strangers. Don't trust white folk you don't know. Don't trust cops. The basics. When Black folk don't want to walk right up and be my friend, I don't take it personally, and I don't get defensive. And I'll tell other thin-skinned white people the same thing. It's not personal. It's survival. Get used to it, and quit whining. — Stan Goff

I felt small, like one does when the distance between stars occasionally asserts itself into your understanding, like when your own death's inevitability leaps in front of you in the middle of the night when you get up to pee. — Stan Goff

Democrat flaks jump on this like ducks on a June-bug, and in the process themselves reproduce the sick militarism of this culture that automatically valorizes anyone who wears a uniform. How dare you insult a soldier! Like its some sacred calling instead of an imperial employment program steeped in the culture of machismo and misogyny.(And you can gasp as theatrically as you want I spent more than two decades wearing a uniform that is exactly what it is.) — Stan Goff

Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project. — Stan Goff