Scorched Earth Quotes

• I only understand friendship or scorched earth.

  Roger Ailes

  Earth

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• We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

  Michael Herr

  Hands, Enemy, Warfare

  Michael Herr (2011). “Dispatches”, p.153, Vintage

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• There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way - and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.

  Paul Krugman

  Mistake, Past, Winning

  "Debt, Depression, DeMarco" by Paul Krugman, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 3, 2012.

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• Recently in Washington, unfortunately, we have seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership -- when politicians choose scorched earth over common ground, when they operate in what I call the 'evidence-free zone,' with ideology trumping everything else.

  Hillary Clinton

  Party, Reality, Justice

  "Hillary Clinton Endorses Terry McAuliffe In Virginia Gubernatorial Race; Four-Year-Old Girl found By Police Without Identification; Escaped Killers' Families Speak Out; Neighbors Describe Death Scene; Bugs Plague College Application Site; The Science Behind Hurricanes; Monsters from the Deep". "CNN Newsroom", www.cnn.com. October 19, 2013.

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• Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, "if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?"

  Charles Stross

  Business, Law, Brain

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• The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.

  Jerry Stahl

  Heart, Eye, Reality

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