“At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years.”
"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999).
Context: At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 120
Russian writer 1918–2008Related quotes
“It is better to live ten years at a thousand [miles per hour] than a thousand years at a ten”
From the lyrics of his song Vida Louca, Vida (Life, Crazy Life)
True God's Day http://www.unification.net/1997/970101a.html (1997-01-01)
Source: Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time
“War its thousands slays, Peace its ten thousands.”
Source: Death: A Poetical Essay (1759), Line 178.
“When the twenty-seven independent Trading Worlds”
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 16 “Conference”
Context: “When the twenty-seven independent Trading Worlds, united only by their distrust of mother planet of the Foundation, concert an assembly among themselves, and each is big with a pride grown of its smallness, hardened by its own insularity and embittered by eternal danger — there are preliminary negotiations to be overcome of a pettiness sufficiently staggering to heart-sicken the most persevering.”
As quoted in Marvin Zonis (1991), Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah, page 65
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