Quotes about war
page 18

“The existence of a state within the State—the Party and the bureaucracy—is a phenomenon of the post-War world.”

Günter Reimann (1904–2005) German economist

Source: The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, 2014, p. 18

“Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say "what should be the reward of such sacrifices?" Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom — go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Speech in Philadelphia (1776)
Variant: If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude <ins>better</ins> than the animat<del>ed</del><ins>ing</ins> contest of freedom — go <del>home</del> from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or <ins>your</ins> arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains <del>sit</del><ins>set</ins> lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen<del>!</del><ins>.</ins>

Love, Men, Friendship, Peace

“War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

"Comment" in The Dial, No. 86 (April 1929)

Peace

“My memory…is of a department without direction, composed of a lot of busy people working hard and usefully but as a whole not functioning as a foreign office. It did not chart a course to be furthered by the success of our arms, or to aid or guide our arms. Rather it seems to have been adrift carried hither and yon by the currents of war or pushed about by collisions with more purposeful craft.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

People, Business, Memory, Success

“Only a fool loves war. Or a man who has never seen it. The trouble is that the survivors forget about the horrors and remember only the battle lust. They pass on that memory, and other men hunger for it.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde, Ch. 24

Love, Men, Hunger, Fools

“In our discussions and exchanges on Berlin and other international questions, the one thing that has most concerned me has been the possibility that your Government would not correctly understand the will and determination of the United States in any given situation, since I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, deliberately plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, First letter to Nikita Khrushchev

Age, World, Understanding, Question

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of this. This is the last citadel for women in our Army. The bias towards officers with an arms corps affiliation in choosing senior leaders has some justification. Close combat is the core business of the Army. But women are already ‘in combat’ due to the changing character of war. Formal recognition of this removes the last defence of those who are resistant to the widest employment of women in the Army, and by extension their promotion to the most senior ranks. It is quite conceivable now that a woman will serve as the Chief of the Army in light of this decision.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, Business, Decision, Light

“There are fears amongst those who are responsible for government to-day, fears not yet gripping us by the throat but taking grisly shape in the twilight, that the Great War, by the destruction of our best lives in such numbers, has not left enough of the breed to carry on the work of Empire. Our task is hard enough, but it will be accomplished; yet who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West, and the civilization of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome? She has left danger-signals along the road; it is for us to read them.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Classical Association (8 January 1926), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 106.
1926

Age, Fear, Reading

“The ultimate Form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Afterword, p. 449
The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition)

“For people like us it is necessary to be a bit stronger, more self-critical, more observant than the usual run. Whether we happen to come already enhanced with these qualities, as some have claimed, or whether our situation invests them in us, we have traditionally - and we do have a long and proud tradition - been a little finer, a little firmer, more sensitive and flexible than others… There will be times when only your own spine can support you, moments when only your own wit can inspire you, days when nothing but exacting self-control can raise you from bed, nights when nothing but your word can impel you into society. But of all these disciplines, there is nothing you must hold to more sternly than to be kind and sympathetic. The easiest armor to put on is always cruelty. That armor will, indeed, see you through everything. Vicious condescension toward those without your strength can make you feel momentarily superior. But that easy armor must be forgone. Don't ever curdle that creamy brow with lines of easy disdain, or curl those lips with a popular sneer. Of all the models available, the one of gentleman in our late war is most succinct: Face what you have to face with humor, dignity, and style; protect yourself with knightly grace; have contempt for your own weakness and never encourage it in others; but never, Ralph, never for an instant permit yourself to feel anything other than pity and deepest sympathy for unfortunate comrades who have, after all, fallen in the same battle.”

Robert Patrick (playwright) (1937) Playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, novelist

One of Those People
Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance (1988)

People, Feeling, Support, Time

“Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: 'Once lead this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”

Paul Johnson (1928) journalist, historian and speechwriter from England

Modern Times (1983).

Men, People, Justice, Revenge

“I find from experience both with government agencies and with private business that there are striking differences. One of those differences is that, in government, there is more continuity and definition in the mandate. The limits of action are often clearly defined. in many cases by Congress. No such situation exists in large private business. Dimock says bureaucracies are related, for example, to size. Yet he points out some bearings on bureaucracies of the inadequacies in our federal civil service system and the conflict of loyalties which arises out of it. This, he states, he succeeded in overcoming. I have had contact with several war agencies made up mainly of businessmen. These men rapidly took on bureaucratic characteristics radically different from their own behavior in private life. The only close parallels I find in the areas of private business to the deadening effects of the present civil service are, on the one hand, what one of my old labor leaders used to call the "sonority" system and, on the other, the very real problems faced by management in dealing with labor which arise immediately out of the prolonged governmental support for organized labor-which is in my judgment bad for labor.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "Governmental and Business Executives", 1946, p. 176; cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 194-5

Life, Men, Behavior, Business

“War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Sinclair (1798)
1790s

Loss

“Let me see if I get this right. We need to borrow $10 billion from China, and then we give it to Musharraf, who is a military dictator, who overthrew an elected government. And then we go to war, we lose all these lives promoting democracy in Iraq. I mean, what's going on here?”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

GOP debate on Fox News, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, January 10, 2008 http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-debatetrans11jan11,0,7962304.story?page=23 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Wuu-ElI56Mw 2000s, 2006-2009

Democracy

“Think well about this, dear brothers and sisters, and you will see that we should have been in a state of terrible chaos, in a fratricidal war, in a country which would no longer be Yugoslavia, but be only a group of petty little states fighting among themselves and destroying each other. But our people do not want that to happen.”

Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 263.
Other

People, Thinking, Sister, Fight

“Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933). Mussolini’s interview was in 1932.
1930s

People

“Beside the staff of life,
taken and fashioned from the heavy earth,
beside our marriage, work, and war
the free man, too, will live and grow towards the sun.
Not the ripe fruit alone —
blossom is lovely, too.
Does blossom only serve the fruit,
or does fruit only serve the blossom —
who knows?
But both are given to us.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), The Friend

Love, Life, Marriage, Fashion

“At the end of the Civil War, the "Slave Power" had been destroyed, free-labor Republicanism was triumphant, and the freed slave was poised on the verge of assuming an equal place in American society with every other citizen. Fifteen years later, the one-time slaveholders were back in control of the South, free-labor Republicanism was coping with the first stresses of mass industrialization in its own Northern backyard, and the freedmen were consigned to an economic peonage that offered little practical improvement on enslavement. It began to seem that a great opportunity had been bobbled away.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

Time

“I can't help thinking that the whole of the Vietnam War was the blackest comedy that ever was, because it showed the way you can't teach humanity anything. We'd all learnt in the rest of the world that you can't now go around and put out your hand and, across seas, exercise power; but the poor Americans had not learned that and they tried to do it. The remoteness of Americans from German attack had made them feel confident. They didn't really believe that anything could reach out and kill them. Americans are quite unconscious now that we look on them as just as much beaten as we are. They're quite unconscious of that. They have always talked of Vietnam as if by getting out they were surrendering the prospect of victory, as if they were being noble by renouncing the possibility of victory. But they couldn't have had a victory. They couldn't possibly have won.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 13

World, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“The (Catholic) church, as far as I know, has not endorsed any war as just since it supported General Franco's invasion of Spain to destroy the Spanish republic with a Muslim mercenary army in the thirties, on the side of Hitler.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

With Andrew Sullivan on Tim Russert, CNBC (2004-09-25).
2000s, 2004

Support

“I see that we must strike a balance. We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Remarks made at the meeting of the German warlords at Advanced General Headquarters at Avesnes (11 August 1918), quoted in John Terraine, To Win A War: 1918 The Year of Victory (London: Cassell, 2003), p. 121
1910s

“The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the débris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Oscar Wilde, letter to Frank Harris, June 13, 1897, in The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962) p. 608.
Criticism

Pleasure, Idea, Strong, Personality

“I haven't heard the president say that we are at war, and that's why I too am not knowing, do we use this, the term "intervention"? Do we use "war"? Do we use "squirmish?"”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

What is it?
Quoted in * Sarah Palin Wonders Aloud if Libya Action is a "Squirmish"
Crooks and Liars
2011-03-29
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/sarah-palin-wonders-aloud-if-libya-squirmis
2011-03-30
2014

“War is always a failure. It means we’ve failed in diplomacy and we’ve failed in talking to one another.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

quoting A C Grayling
"Complete Hero" (2009)

Failure

“Thick rumors of imminent peace are in the air… Big spectacle with six or seven British tanks. In the afternoon, they played war once more at the Palaisplein [near Dam square in Amsterdam center] and at the Rokin [street where Beckmann lived for 8 years, as 'entartete' German artist under German occupation; The Netherlands was liberated by the Allies, 5 May 1945].”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

In Max Beckmann, , Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, p. 80
1940s

Peace

“No one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 2 (p. 15)

Country

“Every campus, of course, also has its rabble of young "liberals," who are forever making a din as they "demonstrate" for "world peash," "snivel rights," and the like, and who, if we may judge from their appearance and their yammering, are as afraid of war as they are of soap. I am sure that every student here present fully understands the importance of staying on the good side of the young "intellectuals" -- I mean the windward side, of course.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"Can 'Liberals' be Educated?", speech (January 7, 1966) published in National Vanguard http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=5442 (July 8, 2005) 1960s

World, Understanding, Appearance

“And so it is, seven years nearly after the War, that we yet see this prolonged and intensified depression, and this horrible figure of unemployment…We stand to-day at a point where, roughly speaking, one out of every ten of the insured population is out of work…But there is no direct remedy from the State alone. There can be no direct remedy by private men alone. Nothing can be done unless we can all pull together with a will. And I am—and I speak seriously—quite profoundly thankful that the Labour Party have been in office, and for this reason: that they now know that they, no more than any other Government, have been able to produce a panacea that would remedy unemployment. And in their hearts they must admit that they have no remedy which can be guaranteed to cure this disease and at the same time maintain unimpaired the international position and power of the British Empire.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Birmingham (5 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp 30-31.
1925

Men, Disease, Time, Heart

“But I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 23, p. 176

Men, Fate, Fear, Feeling

“It is not the business of socialists to help the younger and stronger robbers. Socialists must take advantage of the struggle between the robbers to overthrow all of them. To be able to do this, socialists must first of all tell the people the truth, namely, that this war is, in three respects, a war between slave-holders with the aim of consolidating slavery.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Socialism and War (1914), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

People, Truth, Business, Help

“[one part of the show is] a reenactment of a powerful experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 to look at how normal people can commit atrocious acts, simply because they’re following orders. Milgram’s parents were Jewish refugees in World War II and his pioneering work speaks volumes about the nature of responsibility.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: The Heist (2006)

People, World, Nature, Parent

“Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would gladly yield every honor which has been accorded me in war.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Macarthur and the American Century: A Reader (2001) edited by William M Leary

Peace

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom, Hunger, People, Disease

“12 principles for a 21st century conservatism.
1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted.
4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor.
7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise.
9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change.
10. The government, local and distant, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.
12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Speech of Jordan Peterson at Carleton Place for the Conservative Party of Ontario <nowiki>[12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyw4rTywyY0</nowiki>] Concepts

People, Family, Peace, Parent

“On November 7, 2006, Cafferty called Donald Rumsfeld "an obnoxious jerk and war criminal."”

Jack Cafferty (1942) American journalist

[Crooks & Liars, Cafferty Shows His Love For Rumsfeld, 7 November 2006, http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/11/07/cafferty-shows-his-love-for-rumsfeld/]
2006

Jerk

“The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

From Wichita Vortex Sutra (1966)

“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough — more than enough — of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on — not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, American University speech

Hate, World, Peace, Confidence

“Christian America, religious America I should say — the same thing is true of Orthodox Jews and conservative Jews, although that is a very small percentage of the population — religious America is reproducing well above replacement rate, it’s liberals who are aborting and going gay and anyone with a flair for color, so I think we will have a leg-up in the demographic war, that’s what the left was facing, that they weren’t reproducing enough so they had to bring in the ringers from the Third World to vote for them.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2015-06-09
Ann Coulter: Liberals Are ‘Going Gay’ So They Need Immigrants To Outbreed ‘Christian America’
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ann-coulter-liberals-are-going-gay-so-they-need-immigrants-to-outbreed-christian-america/
2015

World, Color, Thinking

“Humanity is undergoing, in the post-Cold War era, an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the world population.”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Introduction, p. 1
The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003)

World

“Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"A Fun-House Mirror" (1972), pp. 107-108
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

God, Fate, Thinking, Perfection

“May I borrow your wheelbarrow?
— I didn't lay down my life in World War II
so that you could borrow my wheelbarrow”

Adrian Mitchell (1932–2008) British writer

"Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow to Anybody", from Adrian Mitchell's Greatest Hits (1991).

Life, World

“The overly specific sexual orientation, then, reflects a basic division in consciousness. It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced. To some degree each person is at war with the psyche, for all of an individual’s human characteristics must be denied unless they fit in with those considered normal to the sexual identity.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 772, Page 81
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979)

Appearance, Heart, Personality

“All religious wars are about people arguing over who has the biggest invisible friend.”

Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

Many unsourced variations are attributed to Arafat.[citation needed] The actual origin is Richard Jeni.
Misattributed
Source: http://www.gdargaud.net/Humor/QuotesReligion.html

People

“Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus

Death, God

“For the Trade Unions such a scheme as this offers great and evident advantages compared with progressive inflation or with a wages tax. In spite of the demands of war, the workers would have secured the enjoyment, sooner or later, of a consumption fully commensurate with their increased effort; whilst family allowances and the cheap ration would actually improve, even during the war, the economic position of the poorer families. We should have succeeded in making the war an opportunity for a positive social improvement. How great a benefit in comparison with a futile attempt to evade a reasonable share of the burden of a just war, ending in a progressive inflation!”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 5 : A Plan for Deferred Pay, Family, Allowances and a Cheap Ration

Family, Effort

“Mill’s contempt for ancient India extends to the other Asian civilizations as well and... much of Mill’s framework has survived in the colonial and post-colonial Indology. For instance, his idea that the history of ancient India, like the history of other barbarous nations, has been the history of mutually warring small states, only occasionally relieved by some larger political entities established by the will of some particularly ambitious and competent individuals has remained with us in various forms till today.”

Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti (1941) Indian archaeologist

Chakrabarti, D. K., 1997. Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.

History, Idea

“I attended the Royal Opening of the Indian Conference yesterday…Our delegation is starting well, but Winston [Churchill] is in the depths of gloom. He wants the Conference to bust up quickly and the Tory Party to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand. He has become once more the subaltern of Hussars of '96.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to J. C. C. Davidson (13 November 1930), quoted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-1937 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 355.
1930

Strong

“I think Larry is right to notice that the contradictions are catching the allies up already. It's one of those cases where even before you begin bombing the children, the coalition is falling apart. And that's good news. And I'm very much in favor of it. Some Powell or other is messing up the war.”

Eben Moglen (1959) American law professor and free software advocate

Panel on Public Domain at Duke University Law School, November 10, 2001 http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/mpegcast.html.

Children, Thinking

“War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 11

“Youth is the time when hearts are large,
And stirring wars
Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn
To the blade it draws.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

On the Slain Collegians, st. 1
Battle Pieces: And Aspects of the War (1860)

Youth, Time, Heart, Drawing

“The logical thing to do, when the next war comes, is to recruit an army from all those of whatever age or sex who are unable to pass certain basic intelligence tests. This would be a good way of getting rid of a lot of the stupid people who cumber the earth; probably there would be a high percentage of scientists, Civil Servants, uplifters and minor prophets in an armed force collected in such a way. But if every country adopted this method the country with the biggest population of boobs, yahoos and ninnies would win, and I am not entirely sure that we have overall superiority in this respect, though we seem bound in that direction.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

People, Age, Stupidity, Sex

“(While smiling, and jokingly) You haven't come to see me for three weeks. I wondered whether you had become disgusted with us war criminals - particularly me, the so-called archcriminal of them all.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

To Leon Goldensohn, 6/6/46, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Smile

“According to the first image of international relations, the locus of the important causes of war is found in the nature and behavior of man. Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter II, The First Image, p. 16

Stupidity, Behavior, Nature, Selfishness

“Considering the fact that the armies of the Northern and Southern States participated in the hardest fought battles of the nineteenth century, and the additional fact that Maine is the only State which has placed two regiments of different arms of the service at the head of the list in each of these aims, it seems but fitting that, as we proudly look back upon Maine's record in the great struggle for national life, we should be reminded of the career of a Maine soldier, who did much to render famous in the war the name of his native State.”

Charles P. Mattocks (1840–1910) American soldier, lawyer and politician

Read before the Maine Historical Society February 14, 1901, at [Third Series, Vol. I, http://archive.org/stream/collectionsofmai11lcmain/collectionsofmai11lcmain_djvu.txt, Maine Historical Society, 10 April 2018, 1904]

Life

“I felt the ruthfulness and senselessness of war so acutlely that I wrote the first three stanzas of which, are in effect a prayer.”

Richard Eberhart (1904–2005) American poet

The Poetry of War 1939-45 ed. Ian Hamilton, London 1965
"The Fury of Aerial Bombardment"

“And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared--and even the Republicans in that age group. […] You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization--not as much centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual in America. We've spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft.”

Grover Norquist (1956) Conservative Lobbyist

Grover Norquist cited in in " Did the antitax activist tell a Spanish newspaper that the Greatest Generation was "anti-American"? Sort of. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/695jwmmb.asp?pg=1", at weeklystandard.com, 28 September, 2004 2004

People, Age, World, Time

“As a 15 year jurist, I like to think I speak with clarity. So let me try again. When a United States Senator commits a non criminal act of indiscretion; and when it is brought to his attention he immediately has the integrity to apologize; and the apology is accepted by the victim: IT IS WRONG for the dogs of war to leap onto his back and demand his resignation from the United States Senate. It is morally wrong.
And as an aside for all you sanctimonious judges who are demanding my resignation, hear this. I was a civil right lawyer actively prosecuting sexual harassment cases on behalf of the Attorney General's Office before Anita Hill and before you were born.
Lighten up folks. This is how Democrats remain in the minority.”

Bill O'Neill (1947) Ohio judge

Facebook post, 11-17-2017 PM

Dogs, Thinking

“Remember, we weren’t even in Afghanistan by this time. Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem. … That was Obama’s war.”

Katrina Pierson (1976) Political spokesperson

In an interview with CNN. Trump Spokesperson Says Obama Invaded Afghanistan. He Didn’t. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-afghanistan-trump_us_57af33d8e4b007c36e4ef660?utm_campaign=chrome&utm_medium=browser-extension&utm_source=currently, as quoted by Sam Stein. (August 13,2016)

Problem, Time

“We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Address to White House Correspondents' Association, Washington, D.C. (12 February 1943)
1940s

Men, Faith, Way, Time

“If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Sorrow (pg. 189)
The Whole Woman (1999)

Time, Anger

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”

Karl Rove (1950) American political consultant and policy advisor

New York Times (June 23, 2005)

Understanding

“The Afghan War has clearly reached a stage similar to that moment at your child's party where you realise you've forgotten to give the other parents a pick up time.”

Jeremy Hardy (1961–2019) British comedian

The News Quiz, BBC Radio 4, 23 January 2009

Parent, Time

“The Vietnam War is behind us but not entirely forgotten. Like our Civil War, Vietnam holds a fascination for many Americans, and I suspect that this will grow rather than diminish as research continues and new works are published about the war. For the older military professionals who served during the Vietnam War and for the still older career military men who were perplexed by it, my advice is to look at Vietnam in a broader historical perspective. For the young military professional who did not serve in Vietnam, my advice is to learn all you can about the war and try to understand it. Finally for those military men now serving at the top military positions, as well as those who will rise to those positions later, my advice is to do all you can to improve the civilian-military interface in the highest councils of our government. This is the best way I know to better the chances that our civilian leaders truly understand the risks, costs, and probable outcomes of military actions before they take the nation to war. The United States cannot afford to put itself again at such enormous strategic disadvantage as we found ourselves in in Vietnam. How deep Vietnam has stamped its imprint on American history has yet to be determined. In any event, I am optimistic enough to believe that we Americans can and will learn and profit from our experience.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Closing words, p. 209-210
The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984)

Men, Way, History, Understanding

“Nations are divided into "good"and "bad"-the enemy is all bad, one's own nation is of spotless virtue. Wars are either acts of God or acts of the other nations, which always catch us completely by surprise. To a student of international systems the national image even of respectable, intellectual, and powerful people seems naive and untrue. The patriotism of the sophisticated cannot be a simple faith. There is, however, in the course of human history a powerful and probably irreversible movement toward sophistication. We can wise up, but we cannot wise down, except at enormous cost in the breakdown of civilizations, and not even a major breakdown results in much loss of knowledge.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, National images and international systems, 1959, p. 131

God, People, Faith, History

“Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?

And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times ?

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?

Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?

Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?

Frederick the Second won the Seven Years' War.
Who else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?

Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?

So many reports.

So many questions.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"Questions from a worker who reads" [Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters] (1935) from The Svendborg Poems (1939); trans. Michael Hamburger in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 252
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

Books, Question, Time, Reading

“A people under the menace of war and of invasion is very easy to govern. It does not claim social reforms, it does not cavil over armaments or military equipment. It pays without haggling, it ruins itself at it, and that is excellent for the syndicates, the financiers, and the heads of industry to whom patriotic terrors open an abundant source of gain.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

[1914-01-22, Anatole France on Education. Speech at the Inauguration of the Education Part of the Socialist "Maison de Peuple," at Brussels, Translated for "The New Age" by Leonard J. Simons, The New Age (Volume 14, Number 12), 363, http://www.modjourn.org/render.php?id=1165338028234375&view=mjp_object, Modernist Journals Project, 2017-01-04]

People

“But contrast the attitude of the Socialist Government towards their Bolshevist friends and their attitude to the great self-governing Dominions of the Crown. To the enemies of Britain, of civilization, of freedom, to those who deserted us in the crises of the war—smiles, compliments, caresses, cash. But for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, who sent their brave men to fight and die by scores of thousands, who never flinched and never wearied, who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh—to them nothing but frigid repulsion. Our bread for the Bolshevist serpent; our aid for the foreigner of every country; our favours for the Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans, on whom the future of the British island and nation depends, only the cold stones of indifference, aversion, and neglect. (Cheers.) That is the policy with which the Socialist Government confronts us, and against that policy we will strive to marshal the unconquerable might of Britain.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men, World, Smile, Freedom

“Only someone as puffed up and demented as John Maynard Keynes, every left wing fascist's sainted mentor in this connection, could manage to convince himself that taxing America's Productive Class can restore it to prosperity. In point of fact, it's like screwing for chastity, guzzling alcohol for sobriety, or gorging to fight gluttony. It's like killing indiscriminately for peace — oops, Democrats, Republicans and their moral and spiritual ilk have devoutly believed that particular bit of perverse nonsense since at least the War of 1812.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"A Little Austrian Flea".

Alcohol, Peace, Fight

“Winds howl and howl at ghosts of those war's killed—
on soldiers' faces shines the stalking moon.
O men, alive or dead, has anyone
portrayed your faces or invoked your souls?”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 97–100

Men, Soul, Dead

“With two lunatics like Mussolini and Hitler you can never be sure of anything. But I am determined to keep the country out of war. …[Hankey] thinks sanctions were put in [the Covenant of the League of Nations] at the request of the Americans. Likely enough, as they would be the first to run away from enforcing them. You will not get our people for a long time yet to be willing to pledge themselves to go to war for objects in the east of Europe.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Conversation with Thomas Jones (30 April 1936), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 191.
1936

People, Thinking, Time, Country

“War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.
Variant translation: War is too important a matter to be left to the military.
As quoted in Soixante Anneés d'Histoire Française (1932) by Georges Suarez
War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.
As quoted in Clemenceau and the Third Republic (1946) by John Hampden Jackson, p. 228; this has also become commonly paraphrased as: War is too important to be left to the generals.
Post-Prime Ministerial

Men

“The peace we seek in the world is not the flimsy peace which is merely an interlude between wars, but a peace which can endure for generations to come.
It is important that we understand both the necessity and the limitations of America's role in maintaining that peace.
Unless we in America work to preserve the peace, there will be no peace.
Unless we in America work to preserve freedom, there will be no freedom.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Second Inaugural Address (1973)

World, Peace, Understanding, Freedom

“When the world wide war is over and done
And the dream of peace comes through
We'll all be drinking some free bubble up
And eating some rainbow stew.”

Merle Haggard (1937–2016) American country music song writer, singer and musician

"Rainbow Stew", on Rainbow Stew Live at Anaheim Stadium (July 1981) · Performance on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEDT7QGDzsE Variant: One of these days when the air clears up And the sun come shining through We'll all be drinking free bubble up And eating some rainbow stew.

World, Peace, Dreams, Drink

“We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Lessons of the Moscow Uprising" Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 174.
Collected Works

People

“Don't think that I underrate the very great debt we owe to the old diplomacy. Before the new system came into existence, diplomacy was the only protection we had against war; and its achievements were of the utmost importance and value to the human race. But perhaps it is natural that, with rare exceptions, the whole strength of this very powerful organization has been against the new ideas and new principles at Geneva. The old diplomat liked to move with deliberation, in secret, following well-established traditions and working through what he loved to describe as "the usual channels". To him, the open debate carried on, not by professional diplomats, but by politicians and statesmen having little regard for the use of the technical phraseology of diplomacy and intent merely on reaching results which would make diplomacy unnecessary, was offensive to all his instincts.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

The Future of Civilization (1938)

Love, Secret, Idea, Nature

“The possibility of a war under the current circumstances is not far-fetched and there is some evidence for that.”

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1934–2017) Iranian politician, Shi'a cleric and Writer

Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani says Middle East may see a war in the near future http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=12242&sectionid=351020101 (June 6, 2007) 2007

“It was the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, who provided the Israelis with their best propaganda linking the Palestinians with the Nazis and European anti-Semitism. Fleeing British persecution, the mufti ended up in Germany during the war years and attempted to obtain promises from the Germans that they would not support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Documents that the Jewish Agency produced in 1946 purporting to show that the mufti had a role in the extermination of Jews did no such thing; the only thing these unsigned letters by the mufti showed was his opposition to Nazi Germany's and Romania's allowing Jews to emigrate to Palestine.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in "Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?", Journal of Palestine Studies, 2000
On the Mufti of Jerusalem

Home, Support

““You’re actually a soldier,” he said to me, “and you go along with this foolishness?”
“I didn’t ask to be a soldier. And I can’t imagine a peace as foolish as this war we’re in.””

Joe Haldeman book Forever Peace

Source: Forever Peace (1997), p. 227

Peace, Imagination

“Take Kentucky. Kentucky's legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found 'no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility … in Kentucky.' Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.”

James W. Loewen (1942) American historian

2015, Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong (2015)

Hostility, Hope, Imagination, Fight

“Revolution or civil war is the only outcome of the present irreconcilable attitude of Australian political parties. The methods of "democracy," far from providing a means of solving the industrial problem, have proved entirely inadequate to the task. Political organization has been mistaken for political education; the party system has accentuated and added to our industrial difficulties. Democracy has done nothing to help society to unanimity, nothing to aid the individual to a sense of social function.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: Democracy and freedom. 1919, p. 44; Cited in: Wood & Wood (2004, 78).

Education, Democracy, Problem, Sense

“And we will turn our motherland into the graveyard of the U. S forces and their families should wait for their dead bodies. The Taliban's war is only for the freedom of Afghanistan from the enemies of Muslims.”

Mullah Dadullah (1966–2007) Afghan Taliban commander

Taliban deploy thousands of suicide bombers - commander http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL151157.htm 02 Apr 2007. War in Afghanistan (2001–present)

Family, Freedom, Waiting, Dead

“To Mankind
And the hope that the war against folly may someday be won, after all.”

Isaac Asimov book The Gods Themselves

Dedication, p. 5; this refers to the quotation of Friedrich Schiller from which Asimov derived the title of this novel: "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
The Gods Themselves (1972)

Hope

“It's hard for me to see how members of al Qaeda could be considered prisoners of war. I think they clearly do not fit within the prescriptions of the Geneva Convention.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

January 28, 2002. CNN transcript http://premium.edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0201/28/ltm.03.html 2000s

Thinking

“Even after my old man returned from the wars with all his ribbons and a thousand stories I still struggled for survival without my love. He was so busy rigging up the house to look like a ship, printing the rules of command on little notes which he pinned to the wall above the sink, Attention: Do not waste water … Do not throw garbage in here; in the outhouse and in the washroom, Attention: Toilet paper rules … Use only four sections per use … Do not throw funny paper in commode. I doubt if he noticed my dying condition.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 92.

Love, Business, Water, Housing

“"I'm a Soldier, not a bloody clerk! I fetch bloody forage, count bloody shovels, and take punishment drills. It's yes, sir, no, sir, can I dig your latrine, sir, and it's not bloody soldiering!" "It is bloody soldiering! What the hell else do you think soldiering is? Do you think you can win a war without forage? Or without shovels? Or, God help us, without latrines? That is soldiering! Just because you've been allowed to swan about like a bloody pirate for years doesn't mean you shouldn't take your turn at real work."”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Lieutenant Richard Sharpe and Major Michael Hogan, p. 114
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Company (1982)

God, Hell, Thinking, Help

“I acknowledge the Roman Church to be our mother church, although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions…Let [the Papists] assure themselves, that, as I am a friend of their persons, if they be good subjects, so am I a vowed enemy, and do denounce mortal war to their errors.”

James I of England (1566–1625) king during union of English and Scottish crowns

On Roman Catholics, at the opening of parliament in 1604.[citation needed]

Error, Personality

“Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Darwin Among the Machines
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part III - The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit

Death

“Relations between India and China have been founded on solid understanding of the affinities of the cultures and the civilizations of the two countries, and the imperatives of peaceful co-existence and close co-operation between them in the post-cold war world. I believe that India-China friendship and co-operation could be a shining example of concord and harmonious relations between two ancient civilizations and the foundation for a just, stable and peaceful world order.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Press Information Bureau in: Address By His Excellency Shri K.R. Narayanan, President Of The Republic Of India At Peking University http://pib.myiris.com/speech/article.php3?fl=010508171719, press Information Bureau, 30 May 2000

Friendship, World, Peace, Understanding

“Under the pressure of a war to the death, all that was best, all that was most human and gentle on each side was crushed out by military necessity. On the one side, the passion for a unified world, where every individual should live a free and full life in service of the world community, was overcome by the passion to punish spies, traitors, and heretics. On the other, vague and sadly misguided yearnings for a nobler, less materialistic life were cleverly transformed by the reactionary leaders into vindictiveness against the revolutionaries.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter V: Worlds Innumerable; 3. Nautiloids (p. 69)

Life, Death, World, Communication

“Americans, sadly, are now victims who have turned into perpetrators. Indeed, since September 2001, the war on terror has claimed more innocent victims than those terrorist attacks. This fact is unrecognized at home because the victims of the war on terror are not Americans. But the rest of the world does not draw the same distinction, and world opinion has turned against America.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

"How Terrorism's Victims Became Perpetrators" (April 2004) http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/soros26

World, Home, Drawing

“I am she who gave you so much war and completed my day before evening.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

I' so' colei che ti die' tanta guerra,
et compie' mia giornata inanzi sera.
Canzone 302, st. 2
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death

“Let me tell you about the English War Bow, Joscelyn. It is a simple thing, med of yew, a peasant's tool, really. My huntsman can use one, but he is the only man in Berat who has ever mastered the weapon. Why do you think that is? I'll tell you anyway. It takes years, Joscelyn, many years to master the yew bow. Ten years? Probably that long, and after ten years a man can send an arrow clean through armor at two hundred paces. Splat! A thousand ecus of man, armor, and weaponry fallen to a peasant's bow. And it isn't luck, Joscelyn. My huntsman can put an arrow through a bracelet at a hundred paces. He can pierce mail coat at two hundred. I've seen him put an arrow through an oak door at a hundred and fifty, and the door was three inches thick!”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

The Count of Berat, p. 111
The Grail Quest, Heretic (2003)

Thinking

“If we have a thousand bamboo spears, there's nothing to worry about a war with the Soviet Union.”

Sadao Araki (1877–1966) Japanese general

Quoted in "Sugamo Diary" - Page 30 - by Yoshio Kodama - 1960

“To me, every fundamentalist Muslim, no matter how peaceable in his own behavior, is part of a murderous movement and is thus, in some fashion, a foot soldier in the war that bin Laden has launched against civilization.”

Daniel Pipes (1949) U.S. neoconservative columnist, author, counter-terrorism analyst, and scholar of Middle Eastern history

"Bin Laden Is a Fundamentalist," http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-pipes102201.shtml National Review Online (22 October 2001)

Behavior, Fashion, Parting

“If you examine the record of the so-called the anti-war movement in this country and imagine what would have happened had its counsel been listened to over the last 15 and more years, you would have a world in which the following would be the case:Saddam Hussein would be the owner and occupier of Kuwait, he would have succeeded in the annexation, not merely the invasion, but the abolition of an Arab and Muslim state that was a member of the Arab League and of the United Nations. And with these resources as we now know because he lost that war, he was attempting to equip himself with the most terrifying arsenal that it was possible for him to lay his hands on. That's one consequence of anti-war politics, that's what would have happened.In the meanwhile, Slobodan Milošević would have made Bosnia part of a greater Serbia, and Kosovo would have been ethnically cleansed and also annexed. The Taliban would be still in power in Afghanistan if the anti-war movement had been listened to, and al-Qaeda would still be their guests. And Saddam Hussein, with his crime family, would still be privately holding ownership over a terrorized people in a state that's been most aptly described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave underneath it.Now if I had that record politically, I would be extremely modest, I wouldn't be demanding explanations from those of us who said it's about time that we stop this continual capitulation to dictatorship, to racism, to aggression and to totalitarian ideology. That we will not allow to be appeased in Iraq, the failures in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, and in Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And we take pride in having taken that position, and we take pride in our Iraqi and Kurdish friends who are conducting this struggle, on our behalves I should say.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. George Galloway debate http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2005/09/galloway_vs_hit.html, New York City (2005-09-14): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq 2000s, 2005

Time, Parting, Country, Imagination

“The chief of Anhilwara called Bhim, fled hastily, and abandoning his city, he went to a certain fort for safety and to prepare himself for war. Yaminu-d daula again started for Somnat, and on his march he came to several forts in which were many images serving as chamberlains or heralds of Somnat, and accordingly he (Mahmud) called them Shaitan. He killed the people who were in these places, destroyed the fortifications, broke in pieces the idols and continued his march to Somnat through a desert where there was little water.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Ali ibn al-Athir: Kamilu’t-Tawarikh, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 470
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

People, Water

“In as much as the Vendôme Column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorize him to disassemble this column.”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

version in original French: * Attendu que la colonne Vendôme est un monument dénué de toute valeur artistique, tendant à perpétuer par son expression les idées de guerre et de conquête qui étaient dans la dynastie impériale, mais que réprouve le sentiment d'une nation républicaine, [le citoyen Courbet] émet le vœu que le gouvernement de la Défense nationale veuille bien l'autoriser à déboulonner cette colonne.
Quote in Courbet's official letter (4 September 1870), to the Government of National Defense - proposing that the column in the Place Vendôme in Paris, erected by Napoleon I - to honour the victories of the French Army - be taken down.
1870s

Idea, Past