Triple Quote: The Severest School

In the spirit of Thucydides

“He was a master teacher, patient yet demanding and always probing, coaching, and coaxing a little more from his charges. He was never a cheerleader or backslapper. His rare compliments were like nuggets of 24 karat gold and they didn’t come easily.”
- General Peter J. Schoomaker on Dick Meadows, The Quiet Professional

“There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But…For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second. The young men of America, from whatever strata, are raised in a permissive society. The increasing alienation of their education from the harsher realities of life makes their reorientation, once enlisted, doubly important.”
- T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

In a world of safe spaces and participation trophies, where the slave morality has become dominant, those who embrace suffering, hardship and severity will be hated, but never more necessary.

-LM