53
Variant translation: One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one's triumph.
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Source: The Art of War, Chapter X · Terrain
“The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.”
El puro y desadaptado que choca con el mundo de las farsas y de las apañucias.
Source: Aphorisms (2002), p. 32
Ai Weiwei on Twitter in English (beta). (February 22, 2011) http://aiwwenglish.tumblr.com/
2010-, Twitter feeds, 2010-12
“The intention of cheating no one lays us open to being cheated ourselves.”
L'intention de ne jamais tromper nous expose à être souvent trompés.
Maxim 118.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)
1963, Third State of the Union Address
“This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone”
"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.
Source: Report on the Potsdam Conference (1945)
Context: Our victory in Europe was more than a victory of arms.
It was a victory of one way of life over another. It was a victory of an ideal founded on the rights of the common man, on the dignity of the human being, on the conception of the State as the servant — and not the master — of its people.
A free people showed that it was able to defeat professional soldiers whose only moral arms were obedience and the worship of force.
We tell ourselves that we have emerged from this war the most powerful nation in the world — the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history. That is true, but not in the sense some of us believe it to be true.
The war has shown us that we have tremendous resources to make all the materials for war. It has shown us that we have skillful workers and managers and able generals, and a brave people capable of bearing arms.
All these things we knew before.
The new thing — the thing which we had not known — the thing we have learned now and should never forget, is this: that a society of self-governing men is more powerful, more enduring, more creative than any other kind of society, however disciplined, however centralized.
