“The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other.”
Two-Handed Engine (p. 135)
Short fiction, No Boundaries (1955)
Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
Context: We can imagine that Thamus [or Amun: this is a reference to a discussion on the value of writing in Plato's Phaedrus] would also have pointed out to Gutenberg, as he did to Theuth, that the new invention would create a vast population of readers who "will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction... with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom"; that reading, in other words, will compete with older forms of learning. This is yet another principle of technological change we may infer from the judgment of Thamus: new technologies compete with old ones — for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view. This competition is implicit once we acknowledge that the medium contains an ideological bias. And it is a fierce competition, as only ideological competitions can be. It is not merely a matter of tool against tool — the alphabet attacking ideographic writing, the printing press attacking the illuminated manuscript, the photograph attacking the art of painting, television attacking the printed word. When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
“The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other.”
Two-Handed Engine (p. 135)
Short fiction, No Boundaries (1955)
“Well-established democracies do not make war on each other.”
Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 106
Justice Palakidnar Memorial Oration http://groundviews.org/2011/07/27/justice-palakidnar-memorial-oration-economic-development-inclusive-societies-and-peace/, speech delivered at the Justice Palakidnar Memorial Oration in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 24 July 2011.
Also quoted by BBC News, "Chandrika Kumaratunga berates Sri Lankan government" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14274988, 25 July 2011.
"The Old Way of Thinking" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Old_Way_Thinking.html, in The Progressive (November 2001)
Source: The Philosophy of the Act, 1938, p. 187. Essay 13. "Perception and the Spatiotemporal"
Prime Minister's Questions (15 June 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104968
First term as Prime Minister
2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VII, Sec. 1
Context: For the temples, the sites for those of the gods under whose particular protection the state is thought to rest and for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, should be on the very highest point commanding a view of the greater part of the city. Mercury should be in the forum, or, like Isis and Serapis, in the emporium; Apollo and Father Bacchus near the theater; Hercules at the circus in communities which have no gymnasia nor amphitheatres; Mars outside the city but at the training ground, and so Venus, but at the harbor. It is moreover shown by the Etruscan diviners in treatises on their science that the fanes of Venus, Vulcan, and Mars should be situated outside the walls, in order that the young men and married women may not become habituated in the city to the temptations incident to the worship of Venus, and that buildings may be free from the terror of fires through the religious rites and sacrifices which call the power of Vulcan beyond the walls. As for Mars, when that divinity is enshrined outside the walls, the citizens will never take up arms against each other, and he will defend the city from its enemies and save it from danger in war.
The Future of Civilization (1938)