Ernest Hemingway on Justice

"Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl."

"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."

"'Ay,' he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood."

"Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start."

"Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged."

"If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?"

"He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have."

"An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead."

"We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us make our enemies incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, let us learn to live in peace and justice with all countries and all peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate. But first we must educate ourselves."