“He flips to a drawing of a spindly boy wearing oversized glasses, hugging an ABC primer, and sniffing a daisy. This is the enemy. " The first [mistake] is to assume that he is a sort of cretinoid idiot, who can't see, think, or anything. It might be a fair, if dangerous, assumption that the enemy is at least as stupid as we are."”
pg: 11
The Worlds of Herman Kahn: the intuitive science of thermonuclear war.
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Herman Kahn27
American futurist 1922–1983Related quotes
“Only he who is without anything is without enemies.”
Rafael Sabatini (1875–1950) Italian writer
Source: Captain Blood Returns
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi
The Bonhoeffer Reader https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Bonhoeffer_Reader/CNZgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA766, p. 766 <br class="br">Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), On Stupidity
Greg Bear (1951) American writer best known for science fiction
Source: Short fiction, Hardfought (1983), p. 76
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
As quoted in The Military Quotation Book (2002) by James Charlton, p. 93
Attributed
John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father
Homilies on the Statues http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf109/Page_472.html, Homily XX
“Woever he was who first depicted Amor as a boy, don’t you think it was a wonderful touch? He was the first to see that lovers live without sense.”
Quicumque ille fuit, puerum qui pinxit Amorem
nonne putas miras hunc habuisse manus?
is primum vidit sine sensu vivere amantes
Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet
II, xii, 1-3; translation by A. S. Kline
Elegies
“The enemy I see wears a cloak of decency.”
Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), Slow Train
“We thank God that our enemies are idiots.”
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
6 February 2006
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/06/wiran06.xml&DCMP=EMC-new_06022006
2006