Source: The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), Chapter Three: "Natural, Nonlethal, and Lethal Weapons", p. 79.
“To call out for the hand of the enemy is a rather extreme measure, yet a better one, I think, than to remain in continual fever over an accident that has no remedy.”
Book I, Ch. 25
Essais (1595), Book I
Context: To call out for the hand of the enemy is a rather extreme measure, yet a better one, I think, than to remain in continual fever over an accident that has no remedy. But since all the precautions that a man can take are full of uneasiness and uncertainty, it is better to prepare with fine assurance for the worst that can happen, and derive some consolation from the fact that we are not sure that it will happen.
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Michel De Montaigne 264
(1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, … 1533–1592Related quotes

Vol. I, ch. 14.
The Life of Sir William Osler (1925)
Strategy as an Art and a Science http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/theorists/brodie1.htm,1959

The Awakening (1899)
Source: The Awakening, and Selected Stories
Context: The years that are gone seem like dreams -if one might go on sleeping and dreaming- but to wake up and find -oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all ones life.

Source: Address given Assuming the Office / at the Saeima, https://www.president.lv/en/article/address-he-president-latvia-mr-egils-levits-assuming-office-saeima

A statement in this passage is sometimes paraphrased: "Men are better than their theology."
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Compensation
Context: I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are better than this theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his own experience; and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without after-thought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement.

Playboy interview (2003)
Context: I think it's a very confused culture. On the one hand, no one is better than anyone else; no one is prettier. On the other hand, everyone is completely obsessed by their looks and by how they strike the world. On the one hand, we're all equal; on the other hand, everyone's a superstar. It's all very irrational, like all ideology.

“I would rather save the life of one citizen than kill a thousand enemies.”
...malle se unum civem servare quam mille hostes occidere.
According to the Historia Augusta (fourth century), Roman emperor Antoninus Pius often repeated this saying of Scipio ("Antoninus Pius", 9.10); no earlier attribution to Scipio (or mention of the dictum itself, for that matter) is known.
Disputed

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship