“ . . . [Davita] Malo wrote a letter to Kenahu to pass along to the King [Kamehameha III] . . . ‘If a big wave comes in, large fishes will come from the dark ocean which you never saw before. And when they see the small fishes they will eat them up. The ships of the white men have come and smart people have arrived from the great countries which you have never seen before. They know our people are few in number and living in a small country. They will eat us up. Such has always been the case with large countries. The small ones have been gobbled up.’”

James L. Haley
Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

“This is a war. And this war will have a winner and it will have a loser. We are not here to fight the war. We are here to win it.”

General Stanley A. McChrystal, U.S. Army, ret.
My Share of the Task: A Memoir

“A few weeks after my sixtieth birthday I pulled into two barrels, back to back, at Pua'ena Point, on the North Shore of Oahu. They were as deep and long as any tube I had ridden since Kirra, more than thirty years before. Both waves let me out untouched. Being adjacent to that much beauty — more than adjacent; immersed in; pierced by it — was the point. The physical risks were footnotes.”

William Finnegan
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life