Trego's Mountain Ear

I’ve been re-reading the paperbacks of my youth – the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton.  Matt has a somewhat cynical view of the world – a view that is hard to reject, but doesn’t match socially acceptable.  The author, Donald Hamilton described Matt: “He’s actually a nice guy.  He just happens to kill people for a living.”

Here are a few quotations from the series:

“Once you point a gun at someone, you’re a murderer; whether or not you get around to pulling the trigger is irrelevant.”

“Washington is the city of the soft heads and the chicken hearts.”

“You find them in every sport.  The next time you reach the top of Everest, there’ll be a mountaineering expert waiting to tell you sternly that you should be banned from the cliffs and slopes because you used the wrong color of rope and didn’t hammer in your pitons with the proper stylish stroke.”

“When you act like a nice guy, everyone examines your motives with a microscope. When you act like a conscienceless louse, they generally take you at face value.”

“There’s nothing more frightening to me than a character who thinks he knows what a real American is – mainly because it generally turns out he’s convinced it’s somebody like him. It seems an odd notion to me. I certainly don’t want to live in a country populated with people just like me, God forbid! Anyway, I figure there’s room for a little variety in a nation as big as ours.”

“Certainly, if the world ever is saved, it’ll be by somebody young enough not to know that it can’t be done.”

“Always call them ‘Sir.’ They aren’t any harder to kill later!”

“The girl whispered, “I’m dying, aren’t I?” “I should hope so,” I said. “If not, we’ll have to send my associate back to marksmanship school.”

“My job is defending the people and to hell with the laws. Your job is defending the laws and to hell with the people.”

“Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know.”

“Certain people never learn that if they push folks around long enough, sooner or later they’ll start  shoving somebody who won’t take it.  He’ll blow right up in their faces and demolish them and the surrounding landscape; and they – those who are left – will scream about how misunderstood and abused they are,  and why didn’t somebody tell them the guy was dangerous so they could be nice to him?  It never seems to occur to them that there’s a very simple

answer: just be nice to everybody.”

“I get very unhappy without my 38 caliber security blanket.”

“The evening of any day in which someone has tried to kill you and failed is always beautiful, simply because you’re alive to see it.”

“My religion is as indefinite as my politics, but I’ve never been conceited enough to kid myself that, with a few billion other souls to worry about, the Deity takes a special interest in my affairs, although it sometimes does seem that the other guy likes to hang around making things difficult.”

“It’s always a little hard to interpret these characters who deal in abstract concepts like law and justice.”