1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
Context: We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love.
All this, however, is only true so long as we are concerned solely with attitudes towards other human beings. You might regard the soil as your enemy because it yields reluctantly a niggardly subsistence. You might regard Mother Nature in general as your enemy, and envisage human life as a struggle to get the better of Mother Nature. If men viewed life in this way, cooperation of the whole human race would become easy. And men could easily be brought to view life in this way if schools, newspapers, and politicians devoted themselves to this end. But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything towards saving the human race from reciprocal suicide.
“Why should we hate the people we once loved because of a war that mars even our memories?”
Source: Frouzanda Mahrad (an Arabic poem, translated by Mike Maggio in: Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen (2002). The Mandaeans: ancient texts and modern people. New York: Oxford University Press.)
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Lamia Abbas 2
Iraqi poet 1929–2021Related quotes
“We don't stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don't stop hating them either.”
Source: One Last Thing Before I Go
1950s, Loving Your Enemies (Christmas 1957)
“Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix.”
Quoted in [Is Linux For Losers?, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/intelligentinfrastructure/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616theo.html, Lyons, Daniel, 2005-06-16, 2007-01-10]
“True love is that we should hate whatever interferes with our vision of the high and the lowly.”
Source: Arrive at Easterwine (1971), Ch. 6
“People should be travelling to Mars and doing it in our lifetime.”
Page 9
Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007), Foreword to Marc Kaufman's Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission https://books.google.com/books/about/Mars_Up_Close.html?ido6XaCwAAQBAJ&hlen. National Geographic. ISBN 978-1-4262-1278-9.
1950s, Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)
Context: There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater. [... ] when you start hating anybody, it destroys the very center of your creative response to life and the universe; so love everybody. Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life. So Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.
“We cannot love our own people unless we hate those who consciously destroy our kind.”
Race to Extinction
Focus Fourteen