“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer
The Modern Traveller (1898)
Declaration of Rights. Compare: "Whatever is, is in its causes just", John Dryden, Œdipus, Act iii. Sc. 1.
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer
The Modern Traveller (1898)
Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…
Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
Far from living in a world of visions and imagining men better than they are, we see them as they are; and that is why we affirm that the best of men is made essentially bad by the exercise of authority, and that the theory of the "balancing of powers" and "control of authorities" is a hypocritical formula, invented by those who have seized power, to make the "sovereign people," whom they despise, believe that the people themselves are governing. It is because we know men that we say to those who imagine that men would devour one another without those governors: "You reason like the king, who, being sent across the frontier, called out, 'What will become of my poor subjects without me?'"
George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic
Prologue
Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)
Context: Anarchism, nihilism, and terrorism are often mistakenly equated, and in most dictionaries will be found at least two definitions of the anarchist. One presents him as a man who believes that government must die before freedom can live. The other dismisses him as a mere promoter of disorder who offers nothing in place of the order he destroys. In popular thought the latter conception is far more widely spread. The stereotype of the anarchist is that of the cold-blooded assassin who attacks with dagger or bomb the symbolic pillars of established society. Anarchy, in popular parlance, is malign chaos.
Yet malign chaos is clearly very far from the intent of men like Tolstoy and Godwin, Thoreau and Kropotkin, whose social theories have all been described as anarchist. There is an obvious discrepancy between the stereotype anarchist and the anarchist as we most often see him in reality; that division is due partly to semantic confusions and partly to historical misunderstandings.
Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America
Response to a question regarding Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, Camp David speech https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-questions-camp-david-gop-retreat-january-6-2018 (6 January 2018) <br class="br">2010s, 2018, January
Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXVI: On Learning Wisdom in Old Age