Nguyen Van Thieu/t%E1%BA%BFt Offensive

Famous quotes containing the words van and/or offensive:

    To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)