“Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words.”

— E. B. White

"The Thud of Ideas," The New Yorker (23 September 1950)
Context: Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.

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E. B. White 54

American writer 1899–1985

Thomas Hughes (priest) (1838–1911) British missionary

sayings of Muhammad on the subject of marriage, quoted from T.P. Hughes: Dictionary of Islam.
Dictionary of Islam

“I most earnestly beg you to spare no trouble or necessary expense in getting these.”

Henry Knox (1750–1806) Continental Army and US Army general, US Secretary of War

Knox to a local officer while taking cannon to Boston. Reported in David McCullough, 1776 (2005), p. 83.

“"Too much trouble," "Too expensive," or "Who will know the difference" are death knells for good food.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

Foreword to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, July 1961

“[M]others of large families (who claim to common sense)
Will find a Tiger well repay the trouble and expense.”

Hilaire Belloc book The Bad Child's Book of Beasts

"The Tiger"
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896)

“This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"When War Drums Roll" (17 September 2001)
2000s
Context: This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it. Now.

“By holding firmly to a pessimistic, realistic view of what is and is not possible in a society of different ethnicities, we might have maintained the principles of a free republic, and saved ourselves much trouble and expense. In the world at large, diversity causes nothing but problems.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (2009)

“He [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] wanted to say that if certain people have created troubles for the Jewish community they should bear the expenses, and it is not others who should pay for that.”

Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi (1960) Iranian politician

As quoted in Anti-Israel remarks 'misunderstood,' says Iranian official, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 16 December 2005 http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2005/12/16/iran_holocaust051216.html,

“The trouble with me is that I’m an outsider. And that’s a very hard thing to be in American life.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Quoted in The Unknown Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1994) edited by Bill Adler

“Our distrust is very expensive.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“As a little girl my mother used to take me with her to her fittings with her very expensive seamstress. I was dazzled by the beauty of the fabrics and the whole procedure. I still remember the feel of expensive taffeta.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

On the beauty of fabrics
Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

“Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words.”

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E. B. White 54

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