Quotes about collateral

A collection of quotes on the topic of collateral, damage, use, war.

Quotes about collateral

“Freedom exalts power; and, as is always the collateral effect of increasing strength, tends to induce a spirit of liberality. Coercion stifles power, and engenders all selfish desires, and all the mean artifices of weakness. Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a portion of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 8

Beauty, Freedom, Selfishness

“I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

The Poetic Principle (1850)

Truth, Beauty

“The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Women, Men, Art, Business

“I say bomb the hell out of them. If there's collateral damage, so be it. They certainly found our civilians to be expendable.”

Zell Miller (1932–2018) Politician and United States Marine Corps officer

Speech on Senate floor shorty after attacks against U.S. on September 11, 2001. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04E4DC1038F930A2575AC0A9679C8B63; (at end of video http://youtube.com/watch?v=WZvt1tmRImU).

Hell

“I could never convince the financiers that Disneyland was feasible, because dreams offer too little collateral.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted in The Stuff Americans Are Made Of : The Seven Cultural Forces that Define Americans — A New Framework for Quality, Productivity, and Profitability (1996) by Joshua Hammond and James Morrison

Dreams

“Our adversaries have a determination which has existed since at least 1954 to absorb South Vietnam into a Communist state against the will of the vast majority of the people in the South and to rule that state from Hanoi. It is a simple, straightforward objective, no ifs or ands about it. They also have collateral objectives which in the long run may be equally as important to us, such as their desire to demonstrate the invincibility of the "War of Liberation" and in the end to evict the United States from Southeast Asia.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Responsibility and Response (1967), p. 18-19

War, People

“I fear that, eventually, we are all going to become collateral damage in the war on drugs, or terrorism, or whatever war is in vogue at the moment.”

James C. Nelson (1944–2006) Montana Supreme Court Justice

Concurring opinion in Montana v. Pelvit (No. 03-572)

War, Fear

“Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives'.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

The Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism p. 130
The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000)

“One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff. There is a period, well on toward middle life, when a man can say such things to himself and feel comforted.”

William McFee (1881–1966) American writer

Harbours of Memory (1921), p. 114

Life, Feeling

“The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage).”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“On The War Path With Samantha Power,” http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/06/on-war-path-with-samantha-power.html Economic Policy Journal, June 7, 2013. <br class="br">2010s, 2013

War, Time, Reading

“While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances.”

Byron White (1917–2002) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, American football player

Harmelin v. Michigan 501 U.S. 957 at 1023 (1991).

“We did stop the meltdown. We avoided what would have been, I think, a collapse of the global financial system. That was obviously a good thing. But one thing that I was always sure of and the Federal Reserve was always sure of was that a collapse of some of these big financial firms was going to have very serious collateral consequences. There were people arguing even as late as September 2008, “Well, why don't you just let the firms collapse? There is a system that can take care of it: bankruptcy. Why don't you let them fail?” We never thought that was a good option. Particularly, if the whole system had collapsed, we would have had extraordinarily serious consequences.”

Ben Bernanke (1953) American economist

Lecture 3: The Federal Reserve's Response to the Financial Crisis
The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis (2012)

People, Thinking

“Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage?”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

'It was an outrage, an obscenity' http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles196.htm, March 27, 2003 <br class="br">2003

“The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.
The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

[Wired, 2006-08-24, http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71642-0.html, Refuse to be Terrorized, Schneier, Bruce, 2006-09-08]
Human perception of reality, risk and terrorism

People, Training