“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Blaise Pascal144

French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Chri… 1623–1662

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“He that blows the coals in quarrels that he has nothing to do with, has no right to complain if the sparks fly in his face. ”

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“I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.”

Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) religious leader

Source: The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany, p. 270

“The Blockade Laws are about as rascally an invention as the old Corn Laws. Suppose Tom Sayers lived in a street, and on the opposite side lived a shopkeeper with whom he has been in the habit of dealing. Tom quarrels with his shopkeeper and forthwith sends him a challenge to fight, which is accepted. Tom, being a powerful man, sends word to each and every householder in the street that he is going to fight the shopkeeper, and that until he has finished fighting no person in the street must have any dealings with the shopkeeper. "We have nothing to do with your quarrel," say the inhabitants, "and you have no right to stop our dealings with the shopkeeper."”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

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“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

An earlier unattributed version of this quip appeared in What Man Can Make of Man (1942) by William Ernest Hocking: "He lends himself to the gibe that he is 'so very liberal, that he cannot bring himself to take his own side in a quarrel.'" http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/a_liberal_is_a_man_too_broad_minded_to_take_his_own_side_in_a_quarrel/ <br class="br">Source: As quoted by Guy Davenport (The Geography of the Imagination) at page x in A Liberal Education http://books.google.de/books?id=Dly0RgUc0YcC&pg=PR10&dq=A+liberal+is+a+man+too+broadminded+to+take+his+own+side+in+a+quarrel.&hl=de&sa=X&ei=Xt_OUZSGJcjLswaApYDQBg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=A%20liberal%20is%20a%20man%20too%20broadminded%20to%20take%20his%20own%20side%20in%20a%20quarrel.&f=false by Abbott Gleason (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Tide Pool Press, 2010). <br class="br">Source: As quoted by Harvey Shapiro “Story of the Poem”, 15 January 1961, New York (NY) Times, Section SM page 6 https://www.nytimes.com/1961/01/15/archives/story-of-the-poem-the-story-of-the-poem.html?searchResultPosition=1

“When you oppose the shaykh, it's like the slave who kills himself over a quarrel with his master. Hey, why are you killing yourself over a quarrel?
He says, So my master will suffer loss.”

Shams-i Tabrizi (1185–1248) 1185-1248, spiritual instructor of Mewlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhi.

Me & Rumi (2004)

“He changes his opinions as he does his friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed principles; as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels with it. He has no satisfaction but the chase after truth, runs a question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like a vermin, and starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and the leaders perpetually at fault.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

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“Our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world. It is with Colonel Nasser. He has shown that he is not a man who can be trusted to keep an agreement. Now he has torn up all his country's promises to the Suez Canal Company and has even gone back on his own statements.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Broadcast (8 August 1956), quoted in "Oil route 'a matter of life and death'", The Times (9 August 1956), p. 6

“But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man ‘entitles’ him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the ‘sanctuary of his inner nature’ (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my — might.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 219
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“It was an act of madness. We killed each other and destroyed each other's property. It was wrong and both sides were to blame. We have had a difference, a quarrel. We engaged ourselves in a reckless and unprincipled fight.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Remarks at a memorial for Joshua Nkomo (2 July 2000), referring to the Gukurahundi massacres. Quoted in Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future (2009) by Martin Meredith
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“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918): Anima Hominis, part v

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”

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