Quotes about intervention
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“If ever there was a hard-headed and not a soft-hearted Sovereign it was she; if ever there was a place where there was little of that romantic sentiment of going abroad to do right and justice to other people, I think it was in that Tudor breast of our 'Good Queen Bess,' as well call her. … When I see the accounts of what passed when the [Dutch] envoys came to Queen Elizabeth and asked for aid, how she is huckstering for money while they are begging for help to their religion,—I declare that, with all my principles of non-intervention, I am almost ashamed of old Queen Bess. And then there were Burleigh, Walsingham, and the rest, who were, if possible, harder and more difficult to deal with than their mistress. Why, they carried out in its unvarnished selfishness a national British policy; they had no other idea of a policy but a national British policy, and they carried it out with a degree of selfishness amounting to downright avarice.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Rochdale (23 November 1864), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), pp. 484-5.
1860s

Money, People, Religion, Justice

“To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Third Tale (p. 69)
City (1952)

Way, Knowledge

“The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

Behavior, Personality

“The Doomsday Machine is not sufficiently controllable. Even though it maximizes the probability that deterrence will work (including minimizing the probability of accidents or miscalculations), it is totally unsatisfactory. One must still examine the consequences of a failure. In this case a failure kills too many people and kills them too automatically. There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision. And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by the decision makers, it is still not controllable enough. Neither NATO nor the United States, and possibly not even the Soviet Union, would be willing to spend billions of dollars to give a few individuals this particular kind of life and death power over the entire world.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Life, Death, People, World

“It is not for any institutions or any foreign entities for that matter to dictate upon us what to and what not to tax. IMF and its chief has no business in even suggesting that we impose tax on text. The power to tax is inherent in Congress and any external intervention is already meddling with our sovereignty.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Interaksyon http://www.interaksyon.com/article/48379/chiz-asks-imf-chief-not-to-meddle-in-ph-affairs-slams-proposal-to-tax-text 2012

Business

“Yet Hitler managed not to get caught up in the violence directed against real and imagined supporters of the Munich Soviet Republic. According to his friend Ernst Schmidt, he was released again from captivity through the intervention of an officer, who encountered him in the wake of his arrest and who knew him from the front.”

Thomas Weber (historian) (1974) German historian

Source: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), p. 70

Imagination, Support

“Hannan and Freeman examine the ecology of organizations by exploring the competition for resources and by trying to account for rates of entry and exit and for the diversity of organizational forms. They show that the destinies of organizations are determined more by impersonal forces than by the intervention of individuals by the intervention of individuals.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Michael T. Hannan and John H. Freeman. Organizational ecology. Harvard University Press, 1993; Abstract.

“We are saying we are for bilateral relations with all countries but based on respect of Iraq's sovereignty and non-intervention in our internal affairs. It is possible to have friendly relations with all our neighbours on the basis of mutual respect. We are saying we can keep balanced relations and we can have trade and other commercial relations with all countries but we don't accept military bases in our country.”

Raid Jahid Fahmi (1950) Iraqi politician

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

Country

“"We will maintain our stand despite criticisms." (on being told by Downer that the international community would not be happy about the Military's intervention in the political arena).”

Frank Bainimarama (1954) Prime Minister of Fiji

2000, Reaction to calls from Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for the Military to stay out of politics (30 September 2005)

Communication, Happiness

“Down with all colonial policy, down with the whole policy of intervention and capitalist struggle for the conquest of foreign lands and foreign populations, for new privileges, new markets, control of the Straits, etc.!”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 229.
Collected Works

“Over the past year I've thought a lot about censorship, surveillance and regulation of the Internet. Is it necessary? Is it really so dangerous to allow individuals an ability to associate and communicate freely? Certainly there exists a criminal minority who take advantage of the freedom of the Internet, but no one is arguing that crimes shouldn't be prosecuted. This is about allowing the vast majority of people to communicate without state intervention. Despite all the dire warnings, the prophesies of doom and destruction that were foretold by the Pentagon, the US State Department, Hosni Mubarak, even English High Court Judge Eady, I look at the fallout from all that was published in 2010, all the breaches to establishment power that occurred through a networked citizenry- and the good clearly outweighs the bad. From the uprising in Iceland to the ousting of dictators in the Middle East, free speech has fundamentally changed the world for the good.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 236.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

People, World, Communication, Freedom

“Building an integrated, cost-effective, national health service that delivers quality care for all is one of the critical challenges facing anyone with a stake in global health. A mum doesn’t divide the health of her family up into different bits when she goes to a health clinic: ‘vaccines’, ‘malaria’, ‘HIV’. For her a health centre is a health centre and a nurse is a nurse. When she goes to get help, she should receive integrated care for all her family’s needs not just the one thing that centre, or health practitioner, happens to know about. We need to assign inefficient, parallel health interventions to the rubbish bin.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

In an interview with Devex — Jo Cox: A maternal health advocate extraordinaire https://www.devex.com/news/jo-cox-a-maternal-health-advocate-extraordinaire-76186 (12 October 2011)

Health, Family, Help

“In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

pg 397
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Fear, Rage, Parting, Personality

“A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child—such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Source: (1962), Ch. 2 The Role of Government in a Free Society, p. 34

Family, Law, Game

“Furthermore there's the whole argument that the administration made, that so many people were killed by chemical weapons. Their number was around 1,400, the fact of the matter is that over 40,000 other people were killed with bombs and bullets, before those 1,400 people. If 40,000 people were killed, and that didn't provide a moral justification for intervention, what's the moral justification for killing people… when 1,400 die with chemical weapons. I don't get it, in fact, I don't think there's a moral case to be made for intervention.”

John Mearsheimer (1947) American political scientist

John Mearsheimer on America Unhinged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwqqzh59sVo provided by the Center for the National Interest. Here Mearsheimer is speaking about the Syrian conflict and potential United States intervention due to the Assad's regime alleged usage of chemical devices.

People, Thinking

“Without civil intervention the free market tends to monopoly. What we should do is try to restore a truly free market, try to restore a market where there are no barriers to access and people have something other than their labour which they can trade or exchange..”

Phillip Blond (1966) British philosopher

People

“The foreign policy of the US has been one of "empire building" ever since the First World War. The Constitution authorizes government to provide for "national DE-fense", not "international OF-fense". If Americans were really interested in promoting our national safety, they would realize that a policy of constant foreign intervention directly undermines that stated goal. Our country has military forces stationed in 135 countries around the world, and we are influencing their governments and economies either directly or indirectly in every case. That is the political equivalent of poking them in the eye with a sharp stick. It is little wonder then that dozens of countries and millions of people around the world harbor more than a little resentment against us. The recent mutilation of American civilians is just the beginning of the violence that will be directed toward us if we do not bring our troops home where they belong.”

Michael Badnarik (1954) American software engineer

April 2004

War, People, World, Home

“[the authors in Justice Belied made a] compelling case that this system is not only flawed but produces serious and systematic injustice. One major theme pressed in a number of chapters is that the international criminal justice system (ICJS) that has emerged in the age of tribunals and “humanitarian intervention” has replaced a real, if imperfect, system of international justice with one that misuses forms of justice to allow dominant powers to attack lesser countries without legal impediment. No tribunals have been established for Israel’s actions in Palestine or Kagame’s mass killings in the DRC. Numerous authors in Justice Belied stress the remarkable fact of the ICC’s [International Criminal Court] exclusive focus on Africans, with not a single case of charges brought against non-Africans. And within Africa itself the selectivity is notorious – U. S. clients Kagame and Museveni are exempt; U. S. targets Kenyatta, Taylor, and Gadaffi are charged. […] The system has worked poorly in service to justice, as the authors point out, but U. S. policy has had larger geopolitical and economic aims, and underwriting Kagame’s terror in Rwanda and the DRC and directing the ICC toward selected African targets while ignoring others served those aims. Many of the statutes and much political rhetoric accompanying the new ICJS proclaimed the aim of bringing peace and reconciliation. But this was blatant hypocrisy as the exclusion of aggression as a crime, the selectivity of application, the frequency of applied victor’s justice, and the manifold abuses of the judicial processes have made for war, hatred, and exacerbated conflict. The authors of Justice Belied do a remarkable job of spelling out these sorry conditions and calling for a dismantling of the new ICJS and return to the UN Charter and nation-based attention to dealing with injustice.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman, review of Justice Belied: The Unbalanced Scales of International Criminal Justice, Z Magazine, January 2015.
2010s

War, Age, Peace, Justice

“It is a common error, as we have pointed out several times, to interpret opposition to U. S. intervention and aggression as support for the programs of its victims, a useful device for state propagandists but one that often has no basis in fact.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 256.

Error, Support, Time

“Apparently, Courtney Love was at Whitney's "intervention". And when Courtney Love is telling you, you're hittin the pipe too hard, well, things are bad! They're really bad!”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

The D-list (2004)

Love

“We are going through a crucial historical crisis in which each year poses more acutely the global problem of rationally mastering the new productive forces and creating a new civilization. Yet the international working-class movement, on which depends the prerequisite overthrow of the economic infrastructure of exploitation, has registered only a few partial local successes. Capitalism has invented new forms of struggle (state intervention in the economy, expansion of the consumer sector, fascist governments) while camouflaging class oppositions through various reformist tactics and exploiting the degenerations of working-class leaderships. In this way it has succeeded in maintaining the old social relations in the great majority of the highly countries, but must develop conflicts posing the question of power everywhere.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

About the Situationist International movement
Report on the Construction of Situations (1957)

Way, Question, Problem, Success

“The Darwinians have coined the terms pseudoteleology and teleonomy to designate the finality which they at the same time deny. Appearances are deceptive, they say; the materials of life are always the work of chance. What some take for finality is only the result of the ordering of random materials bynatural selection. Even were this to be true, as it is not, the demon of finility would still not have been exorcized. For natural selection is, in essence and function, the supreme finilizing agent. Actually, the terms pseudoteleology and teleonomy are the homage paid to finality, as hypocrisy pays homage to virtue. Giard (1905), himself a shrewd scholar but blinded by a foolish anticlericalism, went so far as to abjure Lamarckism and write, "To account for the wondrous adaptations such as those we observe between orchids and the insects that fertilize them, we have hardly any choice but the bare alternative hypotheses: the intervention of a sovereignly intelligent being, and selection." He cannot have seriously subjected his supposed dilemma to critical scrutiny or he would have seen that he was substituting for the dethroned divinity just such another, a sorting and finalizing, in sum transcendental, agent, natural selection. Paul Wintrebert, a convinced and even intractable atheist, did not fall into the same trap but realized perfectly that Giard's alternative involves, whatever opinion be held, recognizing the intervention of a purposive guiding agent. Giard's concept, which is that held by many atheists and "freethinkers", gives a singular and belittling idea of God. The Almighty, obliged to remodel and retouch His own handiwork.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 165
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)

Life, God, Intelligence, Idea

“How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness… – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Paul Churchland. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. (1st ed.). MIT Press. 1995. pp. 181: Talking about Freudian analysis.

Failure, Science

“Any intervention now would be a triumph for Germany! A military triumph! A war triumph! Intervention would have been for us a military disaster. Has the Secretary of State for War no right to express an opinion upon a thing which would be a military disaster? That is what I did, and I do not withdraw a single syllable. It was essential. I could tell the hon. Member how timely it was. I can tell the hon. Member it was not merely the expression of my own opinion, but the expression of the opinion of the Cabinet, of the War Committee, and of our military advisers. It was the opinion of every ally. I can understand men who conscientiously object to all wars. I can understand men who say you will never redeem humanity except by passive endurance of every evil. I can understand men, even—although I do not appreciate the strength of their arguments—who say they do not approve of this particular war. That is not my view, but I can understand it, and it requires courage to say so. But what I cannot understand, what I cannot appreciate, what I cannot respect, is when men preface their speeches by saying they believe in the war, they believe in its origin, they believe in its objects and its cause, and during the time the enemy were in the ascendant never said a word about peace; but the moment our gallant troops are climbing through endurance and suffering up the path of ascendancy begin to howl with the enemy.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1916/oct/11/statement-by-prime-minister in the House of Commons (11 October 1916) Secretary of State for War

Men, War, Peace, Courage

“In other words, Lincoln's belief was that slavery could be ended peacefully through the action of the states themselves. It couldn't be done through direct intervention by the Federal government, but it could be done within the states themselves. And after all of the states north of the Mason-Dixon line had adopted plans for emancipation—slavery was lawful in every one of the 13 colonies, and the 13 states which declared their independence.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Law

“One recent history of economic thought (Jürg Niehans’s A History of Economic Theory) devotes twenty-four pages to Samuelson’s ideas. Adam Smith only gets thirteen. Samuelson’s work on stock markets and the random walk takes up less than two of those twenty-four pages. He was “the last generalist in economics,” as he liked to say, and for him financial market studies were just a side project that he at times seemed deeply ambivalent about. His intervention was, however, crucial to the triumph of the random walk. Here was one of the most important economists of all time, and he didn’t think the relationship between coin flips and the stock market was a dinner-speech triviality.”

Justin Fox (1964) American journalist

Justin Fox, Myth of Rational Market (2009), Ch. 4 : A Random Walk from Paul Samuelson to Paul Samuelson

History, Idea, Thinking, Study

“I have used the word 'flow' at many places without really elaborating its meaning. What is this flow? And what are these joys? I could call them moments of magic. I see an anology between these moments and the high that you experience when you play badminton or go jogging. Flow is a sensation we experience when we act with total involvement. During flow, action follows action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention on the part of the worker. There is no hurry, there are no distracting demands on one's attention. The past and the future disappear. So does the distinction between self and the activity.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 91.

Past, Future, Joy, Parting

“Many Iraqis believe that without Iranian intervention in Iraq, both directly and indirectly through former Premier Nouri al-Maliki, there would’ve been no IS to start with. Iraq had never been torn by sectarian feuds, although it suffered from ethnic conflicts between Arabs and Kurds. It was Khomeinism, a particularly obscurantist form of Shi’ism, that injected a high dose of sectarianism into Iraqi politics.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Battle of Tikrit’s lessons for Obama http://nypost.com/2015/03/29/battle-of-tikrits-lessons-for-obama/, New York Post (March 29, 2015). New York Post

Suffering

“Let us contemplate two epochal events in the long human story. One is the annunciation of the unity of God at Mt. Sinai. That same God was said to have made man, alone among living beings, in His image. Implicit in the unity of God was the corresponding unity of the human race. But it was only after more than three thousand years, that the Declaration of this unity was made in Philadelphia. One need not believe in direct divine intervention to think that it has been the peculiar mission of the American people to testify to the unity on earth of God, and of man. Such testimony could take no more evident form than in the denunciation of chattel slavery in the founding itself. That denunciation is prominent beyond doubt or denial, in the documents of the founding. Men of reason can agree with men of faith, that neither God nor man could have devised a more dramatic event than our founding to demonstrate to the world the meaning inherent in this unity.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the Human Story

Men, God, People, World

“I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Interview for the French newspaper Le Monde (29 April 1999); this statement is considered the source of the term w:Humanitarian bombing", frequently used about the Kosovo War.

Question

“I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Crime Times, Nov./Dec. 1988

People, Books, World, Fear

“I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse.”

John Stossel (1947) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and libertarian columnist

John Stossel: Not Afraid to Tell the Truth, Sigall, Ed, NewsMax, 2006-06-03, 2007-09-24 http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/6/2/91815.shtml?s=lh,

“[Q: when do you think is it right to intervene in the affairs of another nation? ] I think there are conditions under which that would be possible. One basic condition is that nonviolent -- you mean violent intervention? -- that nonviolent means have been exhausted. That's one condition. A second condition is that the people of the country in which you're intervening support the intervention. Under those conditions -- and you can think of others -- intervention would be justified. However, we don't ever apply those conditions.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Francine Stock on BBC FOUR, January 2003
Quotes 2000s, 2003

People, Support, Thinking, Country

“I believe that we in the medical profession have taken the wrong course. It is as if we were simply standing by, watching millions of people march over a cliff, and then intervening in a desperate, last-minute attempt to save them once they have fallen over the edge. Instead, we should be teaching them how to avoid the chasm entirely, how to walk parallel to the precipice so that they will never fall at all. I believe that coronary artery disease is preventable, and that even after it is under way, its progress can be stopped, its insidious effects reversed. I believe, and my work over the past twenty years has demonstrated, that all this can be accomplished without expensive mechanical intervention and with minimal use of drugs. The key lies in nutrition—specifically, in abandoning the toxic American diet and maintaining cholesterol levels well below those historically recommended by health policy experts.”

Caldwell Esselstyn (1933) American physician, author and rower

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease https://books.google.it/books?id=WDjZpJXEQwkC&pg=PT0 (New York: Penguin, 2007), ch. 1.

People, Health, Disease, Way

“We are entitled to be disappointed, but not to be surprised, by the persistence of governmental intervention in economic life. A school of thought attributes great influence to public opinion in the movements toward or away from laissez-faire. Among the many members of this school one may mention Albert Venn Dicey, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"The Effect of Government on Economic Efficiency." 1988

Life, School, Disappointment

“I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market.”

John Stossel (1947) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and libertarian columnist

The Oregonian, 26 October 1994

People, Beauty

“Neoliberalism is essentially a form of governing that sees democracy as an obstacle, at best, or as an illegitimate intervention into the rule of the market, at worst. For neoliberalism, rule by markets is understood as a form of governance that should be applied everywhere, not just to marketised goods, but to education, prisons, the organisation of state, and so on. So neoliberalism treats popular sovereignty, or decisions based on human agreement and deliberation, as inappropriate interference with the efficient market and the price mechanism.”

Wendy Brown (1955) American political theorist

Neoliberalism Has Eviscerated the Fabric of Social Life http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/neoliberalism-has-eviscerated-the-fabric-of-social-life/, interview with Wendy Brown by Adam Ostolski, Green European Journal, March 2017

Education, Democracy, Decision

“When it broke down, I would break down. I had to wean myself from it just to survive. I had to have interventions. People would say, ‘You’ve got to do something else.’ So that was part of it—being too dependent on this thing I couldn’t count on.”

Suzanne Ciani (1946) Italian American composer and musician

"INTERVIEW: Suzanne Ciani...," (2014)

People, Parting, Dependency

“I am still far from being the type of the positively new women who take their experience as and working women contemporaries, were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center. Nevertheless we would have been able to create and achieve much more had our energies not been fragmentized in the eternal struggle with our egos and with our feelings for another. It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego, a struggle revolving around the problem-complex: work or marriage and love? We, the older generation, did not yet understand, as most men do and as young women are learning today, that work and the longing for love can be harmoniously combined so that work remains as the main goal of existence. Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognize us as a spiritual-physical force. But over and over again things turned out differently, since the man always tried to impose his ego upon us and adapt us fully to his purposes. Thus despite everything the inevitable inner rebellion ensued, over and over again since love became a fetter. We felt enslaved and tried to loosen the love-bond. And after the eternally recurring struggle with the beloved man, we finally tore ourselves away and rushed toward freedom. Thereupon we were again alone, unhappy, lonesome, but free–free to pursue our beloved, chosen ideal… work. Fortunately young people, the present generation, no longer have to go through this kind of struggle which is absolutely unnecessary to human society. Their abilities, their work-energy will be reserved for their creative activity. Thus the existence of barriers will become a spur.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“I don’t really think there is any kind of a reasonable argument against intervention in Syria. Quite the opposite: There is a moral and a human imperative to act that is larger than any nation’s interests and larger than any strategic calculation. That is so obvious it is an embarrassment to have to say it. This is how I thought about intervention in Iraq 20 years ago and it is how I think about what needs to be done in Syria today.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Intervention In Syria is a Moral and Human Imperative", New Republican (February 24, 2012)

Thinking

“The regimentation of agriculture was in both fascist countries the first, and for a considerable time the most drastic, intervention in the free play of economic forces. In either country, and especially in Germany, the threat of the industrial revolution in agriculture had reached a point at which government intervention in the social structure of farming was entirely unavoidable.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 151

Time, Country

“All the Hellenistic States had thus been completely subjected to the protectorate of Rome, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great had fallen to the Roman commonwealth just as if the city had inherited it from his heirs. From all sides kings and ambassadors flocked to Rome to congratulate her; they showed that fawning is never more abject than when kings are in the antechamber…w:Polybius dates from the battle of Pydna the full establishment of the universal empire of Rome. It was in fact the last battle in which a civilized state confronted Rome in the field on a footing of equality with her as a great power; all subsequent struggles were rebellions or wars with peoples beyond the pale of the Romano-Greek civilization -- with barbarians, as they were called. The whole civilized world thenceforth recognized in the Roman senate the supreme tribunal, whose commissions decided in the last resort between kings and nations; and to acquire its language and manners foreign princes and youths of quality resided in Rome. A clear and earnest attempt to get rid of this dominion was in reality made only once -- by the great Mithradates of Pontus. The battle of pydna, moreover, marks the last occasion on which the senate still adhered to the state-maxim that that they should, if possible, hold no possessions and maintain no garrisons beyond the Italian seas, but should keep the numerous states dependent on them in order by a mere political supremacy. The aim aim of their policy was that these states should neither decline into utter weakness and anarchy, as had nevertheless happened in Greece nor emerge out of their half-free position into complete independence, as Macedonia had attempted to do without success. No state was to be allowed to utterly perish, but no one was to be permitted to stand on its own resources… Indications of a change of system, and of an increasing disinclination on the part of Rome to tolerate by its side intermediate states even in such independence as was possible for them, were clearly given in the destruction of the Macedonian monarchy after the battle of Pydna, the more and more frequent and more unavoidable the intervention in the internal affairs of the petty Greek states through their misgovernment, and their political and social anarchy, the disarming of Macedonia, where the Northern forntier at any rate urgently required a defence different from that of mere posts; and, lastly, the introduction of the payment of land-tax to Rome from Macedonia and Illyria, were so many symptoms of the approaching conversion of the client states into subjects of Rome.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The Changing of the Relationship between Rome and Her Client-States
The History Of Rome, Volume 2. Chapter 10. "The Third Macedonian War" Translated by W.P.Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 2

War, People, Youth, World

“By an odd amalgam of liberal economic theory and Beccaria on punishment, nineteenth-century thinkers would replicate this exceptional relationship between markets and punishment: natural orderliness in the economic sphere, but government intervention in the penal realm. This is most evident in Jeremy Bentham’s work. The contrast between Bentham’s presumption of quietism in economic matters and his arch-interventionism in the penal domain effectively reproduced and reiterated the Physiocratic duality of economy and police. On the public economy side, Bentham tended toward Adam Smith’s liberalism. His Manual of Political Economy, written in the mid-1790s, rehearsed a presumption of governmental quietism based on his stringent belief in the superiority of individuals’ information and self-interest. But on the punishment side, Bentham embraced Beccaria’s philosophy whole cloth—especially Beccaria’s notion that policing is a sphere of human activity that must be shot through with government intervention. In fact, the criminal code, for Bentham, was precisely a “grand catalogue of prices” by means of which the government set the value of deviance. The penal code was a menu of fixed prices—the polar opposite of laissez-faire.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 36

Nature, Clothes

“We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 153.

Men, World

“Throughout my life, I have publicly and privately denounced military interventions in domestic politics. In fact, I have been advocating for democracy for decades. Having suffered through four military coups in four decades in Turkey — and having been subjected by those military regimes to harassment and wrongful imprisonment — I would never want my fellow citizens to endure such an ordeal again. If somebody who appears to be a Hizmet sympathizer has been involved in an attempted coup, he betrays my ideals.”

Fethullah Gülen (1941) Turkish preacher, former imam, writer, and political figure

"Fethullah Gulen: I Condemn All Threats to Turkey’s Democracy", 2016

Life, Democracy, Suffering, Appearance

“As a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, your most important intervention was in suggesting that before investigating corruption allegations against senior officers, the CBI should get approval from the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) rather than the government. Didn’t the rejection of your proposal show that all political parties are united in shielding corrupt officers?”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

On the two institutions of Central Board of Investigations (CBI) and the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC).
Fali Sam Nariman: An Interview

“Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, and self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body’s powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. The chronic diseases commonly associated with aging—hypertension, coronary artery disease, Type II diabetes, degenerative joint disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s, as well as most cancers—are not the inevitable outcome of the aging process; they are born out of wrong food choices earlier in life. Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Medical intervention does very little to slow the progression of illnesses and gradual mental and physical decline. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Source: Disease-Proof Your Child (2005), Ch. 1, p. 7

Life, People, Health, Youth

“The fundamental error of the theologians of the new faith of the present day consists in this, that they think one can without hesitation acknowledge the validity of the same scientific method in the realm of nature which they refuse to apply to that of history. … What consequence now will follow the application of the doctrine of evolution to the theological consideration of history? First of all, it is evident that it excludes miracles in every sense of the word—not merely the nature-miracle (this the men of the new faith drop without pain) but also just as much the spirit-miracle, i. e. the intervention of a foreign power in the human soul, whereby conditions are produced in it which do not result from the causal connection with antecedent conditions. If it is the methodic cardinal proposition of the science of today that we have to explain every condition as the causally determined development out of a preceding one, this excludes on principle the appearance of a condition, event, action, or personality which is not explicable out of the factors of the preceding conditions.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), pp. 8-9.

Men, Pain, Faith, Error

“I myself am no opponent of State intervention. I have never been, and never shall be, as soon as it is shown to me that State intervention can achieve some good end which cannot be reached without it. And I hope that opinion will soon turn in the direction of municipal intervention in these affairs, wherever municipal intervention is adequate, and I will tell you why…I believe that in municipalities the area of supervision is sufficiently small, that people concerned come up in sufficiently close quarters with the matters of administration to enable them to avoid all the dangers, risks, and wastes to which the general state of capitals is open.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech to the annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation (20 November 1890), quoted in 'Mr. Morley At Sheffield', The Times (21 November 1890), p. 10.

People, Hope

“Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.”

John Shelby Spong (1931) American bishop

"Why We Must Reclaim The Bible From Fundamentalists" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-shelby-spong/why-i-wrote-re-claiming-t_b_1007399.html, The Huffington Post (13 October 2011)

Life

“I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn't it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball?”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/angels-in-the-outfield-1994 of Angels in the Outfield (15 July 1994) Reviews, Two star reviews

God, Sport

“On November 24, 1914, when he was expelled from the Socialist Party, Mussolini insisted that his expulsion could not divest him of his ‘socialist faith.’ He made the subtitle of his new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘A Socialist Daily.’ National intervention in the European conflagration was an immediate issue and as a problem it divided socialists, but since most continental socialist parties had opted for war, Mussolini conceived at that time that interventionism was not a commitment sufficient to require the abandonment of socialism.”

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

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 141

War, Faith, Problem, Time

“Interviewer: It seems to be acknowledged that there're more people out there supporting the aims of Al-Qaeda and groups like them, and are willing to die, as a result of this war, than perhaps there were previously?

Hitchens: Well, you could as easily say that the number of people who used to be based in Afghanistan, have, as a result of the intervention there, relocated themselves and spread the virus in that way. Both of these arguments lead to only one terminus, which is: we should surrender to jihadism, and not try to oppose it, in case we make them upset.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Scotland Live (2005-10-31}: On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2005

War, People, Way, Support

“Perhaps His experiment went spectacularly wrong, sir. Perhaps He's just baffled. Seeing the mess, not knowing how to put it right. Perhaps not wanting to put it right. Perhaps He only had enough power left for one final intervention. So He made it. Whoever He is, whatever He is, I hope he burns in His own Hell.”

P. D. James book The Children of Men

A driver upon being asked if he believed in God.
The Children of Men (1992)

Hope, Hell

“The notion that human interaction could spontaneously and autonomously achieve a stable, orderly, self-sustaining form of equilibrium in the absence of government intervention—what François Quesnay and the first school of économistes dubbed un ordre naturel in the late 1750s—has facilitated a conception of the market as a self-regulating system that could only prosper by purging itself of the prejudicial meddling of governments and politics. In the face of this new conception of an orderly market, governance would be relegated outside that autonomous space, charged with the responsibility of policing and punishing those who deviate—those who do not see the natural laws or, in more technical jargon, who bypass the market.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 241

School, Law, Nature

“… no diplomatic intervention will ever be made by any government that I lead in support of any individual terrorist's life. We have only indicated in the past, and will maintain a policy in the future, of intervening diplomatically in support of Australian nationals who face capital sentences abroad.”

Kevin Rudd (1957) Australian politician, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

ALP in 'me-too' policy mess over death penalty
Response to a backlash following statements made by Robert McClelland, days before the fifth anniversary of the 2002 Bali bombings, who said that Labor would campaign internationally to stop executions of terrorists.
2002

Life, Support, Past, Future

“Property rights, governance structures and rules of exchange are arenas in which modern states establish rules for economic actors. States provide stable and reliable conditions under which firms organize, compete, cooperate and exchange. The enforcement of the laws affects what conceptions of control can produce stable markets. There are political contests over the content of laws, their applicability to given firms and markets, and the extent and direction of state intervention into economy. Such laws are never neutral. They favor certain groups of firms.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: Markets as politics: A political-cultural approach to market institutions, 1996, p. 657

Law

“Yet we slink about like whipped curs … our self-abasement principally takes the form of subservience to the United States … we are under no necessity to participate in the American nightmare of a Soviet monster barely held at bay in all quarters of the globe by an inconceivable nuclear armament and by political intervention everywhere from Poland to Cambodia. It is the Americans who need us in order to act out their crazy scenario… We simply do not need to go chasing up and down after the vagaries of the next ignoramus to become President of the United States.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The Sunday Express (4 February 1982), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 853.
1980s

“The truth of matter is, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, religion has it very much its own way in this country of ours. It's in the pledge of allegiance, thanks to a stupid intervention of President Eisenhower; it's on the money, it's in the opening of Congress every day, it's at the National Prayer Breakfast, it's when the delinquent president summons his advisors and his spiritual team in order to fend off what should have been inevitable, it's when Al Gore can't bring himself to criticize a decision of the Oklahoma school board, and it's high time that that situation was reversed and we developed a proper immunity to it, and made sure that religion can only be self-inflicted.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

Money, Truth, Stupidity, School

“And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time, or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to raise the sun works—it comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I say my prayers each night and the world hasn’t ended yet…
Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely happen and aren’t ordained, that some things occur for no real reason whatsoever, and that this is not a punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed, platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy masterplan, would be if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious.”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

“Piece” (p. 75)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

Life, World, Thinking, Time

“The left should carve out a new long-term narrative about British foreign policy: one that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage again. And one that reasserts our commitment to the responsibility to protect those most at risk of mass atrocity crimes. This isn’t really about being pro or anti-military intervention. Rather it’s a call to redefine the principles that will guide the decisions we take, as well as a commitment to then honour them.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

Decision

“Darwin had found a way in which a species could be shaped to fit its environment—not by divine intervention, not by mind, but through the steady, relentless working of natural law. Just like the Huttonian prescription for the Earth, it was a Newtonian scheme for life. For better or worse, Darwin transformed our view of our place in the universe. Humans too are not the outcome of a divine design, but simply products of the relentless workings of natural laws, just like rivers and mountains, beetles and whales.”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 20, “It altered the tone of one’s mind” (p. 208)

Life, Law, Way, Mountain

“Bobbio’s theoretical defence of the distinction between Left and Right, for all its eloquence, may thus be more vulnerable than it appears. If we ask why this should be so, the answer surely lies in the difficulty of constructing an axiology of political values without coherent reference to the empirical social world. Bobbio often writes as if he could separate his ideal taxonomy from contemporary history, but of course he cannot. In practice he admits the political scenery of the present into his account selectively, for the purposes of his argument. But it is in that present that the deeper reasons and limits of his intervention lie.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 6. "Plotting Values, Norberto Bobbio" (1998)

Lie, World, History, Appearance

“I often discuss the benefits of adopting a plant-based diet with patients who have high cholesterol, diabetes, hypertension, or coronary artery disease. I encourage these patients to go to the grocery store and sample different plant-based versions of many of the basic foods they eat. … Interestingly, our ACC/American Heart Association (AHA) prevention guidelines do not specifically recommend a vegan diet, as the studies are very large and observational or small and randomized, such as those on Ornish's whole food, plant-based diet intervention reversing coronary artery stenosis. The data are very compelling, but larger randomized trials are needed to pass muster with our rigorous guideline methodology. Wouldn't it be a laudable goal of the American College of Cardiology to put ourselves out of business within a generation or two? We have come a long way in prevention of cardiovascular disease, but we still have a long way to go. Improving our lifestyles with improved diet and exercise will help us get there.”

Kim A. Williams (1955) American cardiologist

"CardioBuzz: Vegan Diet, Healthy Heart?" https://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Prevention/46860, MedPage Today (July 21, 2014).

Disease, Food, Way, Exercises

“Standing by me and helping my work as newspaper man were the Fascisti. They were composed of revolutionary spirits who believed in intervention. They were youths—the students of the universities, the socialist syndicalists—destroying faith in Karl Marx by their ideals.”

Benito Mussolini book My Autobiography

My Autobiography, New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1928. Reprinted in Benito Mussolini, My Rise And Fall, Volumes 1-2 Da Capo Press, 1998 (p.40).
1920s

Youth, Faith, Universe, Help

“The widespread assumption that big business and big government are fundamentally at odds, and that big business supports a free market, serves to maintain the ruling partnership in power; indeed, ‘vulgar liberalism’ and ‘vulgar libertarianism’ (in Carson’s sense) represent the dominant ideologies of the establishment left and establishment right, respectively. The establishment left disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as government intervention on behalf of the poor, while the right disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as an opposition to government intervention per se – and each side has an interest in maintaining the myth propagated by its nominal opponent. For those who are repelled by the realities of corporate capitalism are lured into becoming opponents of the free market and foot soldiers for the left wing of the ruling class, while those who are attracted by free-market ideals are lured into becoming defenders of corporate capitalism and foot soldiers for the right wing of the ruling class. Either way, the partnership as a whole has its power reinforced.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

Source: "Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice" (2012), p. 422

Way, Business, Support, Reality

“Al Franken deserves condemnation, but President Trump's intervention, given his own self-confessed misconduct, makes what should be bipartisan seem merely partisan. Not helpful. Pots and kettles, Mr. President, pots and kettles.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/931493632468758528 (17 November 2017) 2017

Help

“We cannot possibly capture reality based on our limited perceptions and insignificant power. Therefore, we want to use our intelligence to sustain the mind properly, in order to prevent it from being dragged under by the senses. We want to use our intelligence to open ourselves up to receiving divine intervention. We want to use our intelligence to truly understand how to become a genuine lover of the Lord.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

?
Books, Reflections on Sacred Teachings, Volume IV: Sri Isopanisad (Hari-Nama Press, )

Intelligence, Lovers, Understanding, Reality

“An earlier version of this volume was originally contracted for and produced as a monograph by Warner Modular Communications, Inc., a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment conglomerate. The publishing house had run a relatively independent operation up to the time of the controversy over this document. The editors and publisher were enthusiastic about the monograph and committed themselves to put it out quickly and to promote it with vigor. But just prior to publication, in the fall of 1973, officials of the parent company got wind of it, looked at it, and were horrified by its “unpatriotic” contents. Mr. William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, for example, was deeply pained by our statement on page 7 of the original that the “leadership in the United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the single most important instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.” So pained were Sarnoff and his business associates, in fact, that they were quite prepared to violate a contractual obligation in order to assure that no such material would see the light of day. […] they decided to close down the publishing house […]. The history of the suppressed monograph is an authentic instance of private censorship of ideas per se. The uniqueness of the episode lies only in the manner of suppression. Usually, private intervention in the book market is anticipatory, with regrets that the manuscript is unacceptable, perhaps “unmarketable.””

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Sometimes the latter contention is only an excuse for unwillingness to market, although it may sometimes reflect an accurate assessment of how the media and journals will receive books that are strongly critical of the established order.
Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. xiv-xvii.

Pain, War, Books, World

“By the oath I have taken "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," duty directs — and strong personal conviction impels — that I advise the Congress that action is necessary, and necessary now, if the Constitution is to be upheld and the rights of all citizens are not to be mocked, abused and denied. I must regretfully report to the Congress the following facts:
1. That the Fifteenth Amendment of our Constitution is today being systematically and willfully circumvented in certain State and local jurisdictions of our Nation.
2. That representatives of such State and local governments acting "under the color of law," are denying American citizens the right to vote on the sole basis of race or color.
3. That, as a result of these practices, in some areas of our country today no significant number of American citizens of the Negro race can be registered to vote except upon the intervention and order of a Federal Court.
4. That the remedies available under law to citizens thus denied their Constitutional rights — and the authority presently available to the Federal Government to act in their behalf — are clearly inadequate.
5. That the denial of these rights and the frustration of efforts to obtain meaningful relief from such denial without undue delay is contributing to the creation of conditions which are both inimical to our domestic order and tranquillity and incompatible with the standards of equal justice and individual dignity on which our society stands.
I am, therefore, calling upon the Congress to discharge the duty authorized in Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment "to enforce this Article by appropriate legislation."”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)

Justice, Law, Color, Effort

“A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Science and Religion (1941)

Truth, Religion, Way, Error

“Moral indignation, … the intervention into the affairs of others because we think them wicked, must necessarily be replaced by humanitarianism, which, using the language of therapy and healing, intervenes in what it perceives as the best interests and well-being of the individuals involved. Heresy or ungodliness become personal or social pathology.”

Jock Young (1942–2013) British sociologist and criminologist

“The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy,” Images of Deviance (1971), p. 32

Thinking, Personality

“Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled." But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised the question involuntarily arises to what principle, to what final aim these. enormous sacrifices have been offered.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Geschichte Als Schlachtbank
Pt. III, sec. 2, ch. 24 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 22 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Life, Wisdom, People, Truth

“I must give some attention to the delicate question of religion, on which I have touched already. In my father's generation this question still was discussed with passion. Since then a sort of truce has existed in the countries of the West, while in the communist states of the East atheism has been made into the State religion. It is not advisable to blow on the embers of such controversies. But as I am talking about the limitations of our physical world picture I cannot but say that I do not believe in transgressions of the laws of nature. As these laws are of a statistical nature, and therefore allow deviations from the norm, I must define more clearly what I mean. The statistical deviations themselves obey certain laws. The miraculous events of religious tradition, however, are of a different kind, they lie on a different plane altogether; they are meant to prove something lying entirely beyond scientific consideration, such as the power of prayer, the intervention of divine power for or against certain men or nations.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Men, Lie, World, Religion

“The Republican Party is for positive intervention. They propose, as our fathers did, to erect a wall of intervention, of prohibition, and station an angel of liberty at the gates in that wall, who shall keep watch and ward there day and night, and guard the territories against the entrance of slavery, as the cherubim of God kept sin out of Eden.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838&ndash;64 https://web.archive.org/web/20160319082926/https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA233#v=onepage&q&f=false (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 233 1860s, Speech (October 1860)

God, Angels, Night

“Such was the man who was sent on an embassy to Ajmir, in order that the Rai (Pithaura) of that country might see the right way without the intervention of the sword, and that he might incline from the track of opposition into the path of propriety, leaving his airy follies for the institutes of the knowledge of Allah, and acknowledging the expediency of uttering the words of martyrdom and repeating the precepts of the law, and might abstain from infidelity and darkness, which entails the loss of this world and that to come, and might place in his ear the ring of slavery to the sublime Court (may Allah exalt it!) which is the centre of justice and mercy, and the pivot of the Sultans of the worldand by these means and modes might cleanse the fords of good life from the sins of impurity'…'The army of Islam was completely victorious, and 'an hundred thousand grovelling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell'… After this great victory, the army of Islam marched forward to Ajmir, where it arrived at a fortunate moment and under an auspicious bird, and obtained so much booty and wealth, that you might have said that the secret depositories of the seas and hills had been revealed….'While the Sultan remained at Ajmir, he destroyed the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were divulged and established”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

About the conquest of Ajmer (Rajasthan) Hasan Nizami: Taju’l-Ma’sir, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 213-216. Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

Life, Secret, World, Justice

“The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in his book Desiring Arabs (2008).
Desiring Arabs

People, World, Universe

“Does it not seem to you, Justice Joyce, that this series of statistics might well occur without the intervention of any Divine Will whatsoever?”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

The Executioner, p. 136
The Unexpected Dimension (1960)

Justice

“I thought about the Elder Gods and wondered at how they might change things if the way were opened for their return. The world could be a good place or a nasty place without supernatural intervention; we had worked out our own way of doing things, defined our own goods and evils. Some gods were great for individual ideals to be aimed at, rather than actual ends to be sought, here and now. As for the Elders, I could see no profit in intercourse with those who transcend utterly. I like to keep all such things in abstract, Platonic realms and not have to concern myself with physical presences.”

Roger Zelazny book A Night in the Lonesome October

October 21 (pp. 138-139)
A Night in the Lonesome October (1993)

God, World, Way, Evil

“In these most recent 20 years -- the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world -- America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved -- and resulted in -- the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. The two Balkan interventions -- as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims (43 Americans were killed) -- were humanitarian exercises of the highest order, there being no significant U. S. strategic interest at stake. In these 20 years, this nation has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, anywhere on Earth. Why are we apologizing?”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, January 30, 2009, "Outreach, Yes. Apology, No: We’ve Never Been Islam’s Enemy" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer013009.php3 at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2009

People, World, Exercises, Suffering

“The doctrine of laissez-faire in the mid-nineteenth century essentially allowed three functions for the government: first, maintaining the external defense of the country; second, providing for the internal order and security of persons; and third, possibly, providing for minimal public amenities. … Criminalization and punishment became, undisputedly, the most legitimate and competent task of the government. There, for sure, government intervention was proper, necessary, legitimate, and competent. There, natural orderliness had to be replaced by governmental ordering.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 37

Nature, Personality, Country

“An important body of evidence that suggests the irrelevance of enemy atrocities to U. S. intervention in Vietnam may be found in official Washington responses to a broader spectrum of foreign atrocities. Official estimates of deliberate NLF killings in South Vietnam for the nine-year period 1958-1966 are on the order of 12,000, and the Defense Department estimates 19,578 enemy killings of civilians in South Vietnam from 1964 through September 1969. Yet in 1966 between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered in Indonesia without even provoking any official U. S. protest, let alone an invasion to prevent mass murder.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities, 1970, pp. 13-14.

Women, Men, Children

“Computer-aided design is not automatic design, although it must include many automatic design features. By automatic design we mean design procedures which are capable of being completely specified in a form which a computer can execute without human intervention.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Computer-Aided Design: A Statement of Objectives (1960), p. 2.

“Israel's continued refusal to change its Jewish supremacist character or its racist policies toward the Palestinian people is portrayed in the international press and by official Israeli rhetoric as a defense of its 'democratic' principles and in defense of a Jewish people whose historic persecution came to a halt only because of Zionism's intervention.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

People, Change

“Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.”

Ayn Rand book The Voice of Reason

The Voice of Reason (1989)

“We have said, and we will always say again, that we are opposed to the intervention of foreign military forces. But which was the lesser evil? Chaos, civil war, counter-revolution, and a new world war, or an intervention by Soviet troops? … I say clearly that the first alternative was the worst thing that could have occurred, and the second, the intervention of Soviet troops, was a necessary evil.”

Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

Tito on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as quoted in Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 342.
Other

War, World, Evil

“My councils do not need a Friar’s intervention,” said Manfred; “and of all men living is that hoary traitor the only one whom you delight to confer with?”

Horace Walpole book The Castle of Otranto

Section 4
The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Men

“I will not talk of non-intervention, for it is not an English word.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

When an MP sought to correct Palmerston when he said "non-interference" instead of "non-intervention" in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1832/aug/02/germany-protocol-of-the-diet (2 August 1832) 1830s

“The Soviet Union, true to the Leninist principles of respect for the rights and national independence of all peoples great or small, has always been and is guided in its relations with other countries by the principles of mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-intervention in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefits, peaceful coexistence and economic cooperation.”

Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "The Nineteen Days: A Broadcaster's Account of the Hungarian Revolution" - by George R. Urban - 1957

People, Peace, Country

“One extraordinary fiction of the Egyptian mythology was the supposed intervention of a masculo-feminine principle, to which was assigned the development of the embryo world, somewhat in the way of incubation. For the doctrine was, that when the first chaotic mass had been produced, in the form of an egg, by a self-dependent and eternal Being, it required the mysterious functions of this masculo-feminine demi-urgus to reduce the component elements into organized forms.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 12
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

World, Way, Dependency

“American intervention in Yemen is a product of the war on terror…Because American security was given priority over all other concerns, counterterrorism agencies paid no attention to the human rights abuses being committed by their local partners…Because America has invested so heavily in Yemen’s security forces, it now seems that a transition to democracy will depend on whether Washington believes that investment will remain secure…Sadly, it seems likely that the United States will support figures from the old regime rather than allow a transitional government approved by the people to take control”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Yemen’s Unfinished Revolution, 2011

War, People, Democracy, Support

“It might bear remembering that when, in 1989, Ceausescu did try to go to war with his own population, Secretary of State James Baker made the unprecedented public statement that the United States would not object to a Russian intervention to spare further chaos and misery in Romania. Are the Russians and the Chinese so wedded to the legal niceties, or so proud of their association with Qaddafi, that they would repudiate a speech from President Barack Obama in which he asked for reciprocation? We cannot know this if such a speech is never made or even contemplated…There are a number of other low-cost tactics that could affect the odds, such as jamming Qaddafi's airwaves. But what principally strikes the eye is not the absence of resources—or, indeed, options—but the absence of preparedness…If the other side in this argument is correct, or even to the extent that it is correct, then we are being warned that a maimed and traumatized Libya is in our future, no matter what. That being the case, a piecemeal and improvised policy is the least pragmatic one. Even if Qaddafi temporarily turns the tide, as seems thinkable, and covers us all with shame for doing so, we will still have it all to do again. Let us at least hope that certain excuses will not be available next time.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2011-03-14
Don't Let Qaddafi Win
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/03/dont_let_qaddafi_win.html: On the 2011 Libyan civil war
2010s, 2011

War, Hope, Wedding, Time

“Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Economic 'Plan'?" September 11, 2012 http://lewrockwell.com/sowell/sowell110.html="An. 2010s

People, Fear, History, Dependency

“Some people, myself included, advocated foreign intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo while opposing our adventure in Iraq. Sam Moyn might find this inconsistent, but (on this occasion at least) it is the world that is inconsistent, not us. During the Balkan wars individuals’ rights were under ascertainable threat in real time. Outside intervention could make a difference, and it did. This was not the case in Iraq. We should always be suspicious of the invocation of universal “rights” as a cover for sectional interests. But it doesn’t follow from this that talk of rights is “really” always about something else. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. How, then, should we adjust our response? Well, there is a serviceable Keynesian answer to that: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?””

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

"Double-Entry Moral Bookkeeping", The Nation (April 25, 2007)

War, People, World, Universe

“By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 167.

Nature, Time, Personality

“[Gladio] had been founded in almost all the Countries that belonged to the Nato, and for Nato's wish, aware that its European partners would not have been able to withstand the attack of a much power armed as the Soviet union: they would have to wait for the rescue, the intervention of America. It's demonstrated by the fact that when this plan was revealed, no other country found nothing to say. Only we Italians – the usual idiots and fools novelists – made it the subject of scandal and pretext of «Crime fictions» that still find credit, as this letter shows. I also feel shocked, and bit offended. But just because no one has called me for adherence to Gladio: I would have given it with enthusiasm.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Corriere della Sera http://web.archive.org/web/20151108234947/http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/1997/luglio/06/Caso_Moro_non_piu_nulla_co_0_9707062761.shtml, 7 June 1997, p. 35. 1950s - 1990s

Fools, Feeling, Waiting, Country

“Real togetherness in married couples and indeed in any couple comes from words, not just the words that are spoken – spoken voluntarily – but the words one doesn't keep to oneself – at least not without the intervention of the will.”

Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer

La verdadera unidad de los matrimonios y aun de las parejas la traen las palabras, más que las palabras dichas—dichas voluntariamente—, las palabras que no se callan—que no se callan sin que nuestra voluntad intervenga—.
Source: Corazón tan blanco [A Heart So White] (1992), p. 132

“Allow me to say how manly and humanly great of you I think this is. Your courageous and firm intervention have met with nothing but recognition throughout the entire world. I congratulate you for all you have given anew to the German nation by crushing the intended second revolution.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

Letter sent to Adolf Hitler praising his firm action against the Sturm Abteilung on the Night of the Long Knives (12 July 1934). Quoted in "Nazi conspiracy and aggression" - Page 940 - 1946.
1940s

World, Courage, Thinking

“Sparrow: Listen, Mo. I have been doing crisis intervention with battered, homeless women and kids all week long. Tonight, I am going to vegetate in front of the TV. If you're so worried about Bosnia, go join the Red Cross.”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#157, "Diversions" (1993), collected in Spawn of DTWOF (1993).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Women

“A religious minority is a law unto itself. The institutions run by it enjoy protection both from their staff as well as from the Government. Their properties are safe and their management secure from Government intervention, very unlike institutions run by Hindus which enjoy no such protection and which are subject to all kinds of interference from a Government which takes pride in being ‘secular’, and which has developed aversion of secularity informed by anti-Hindu animus. The Indian Express reports ( 28/29 January, ’86 ) that the famous temple of Lord Venkateswara at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh has been ordered to pay rupees twenty crores as tax on the “sales” of prasadam since 1975! The Aurangzebi spirit is very much alive. Favoured treatment and discriminatory taxes have been used by Governments in the past to promote particular culture-groups and destroy others.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Ramakrishna Mission. (1986). Ramakrishna Mission: In search of a new identity.

Law, Past

Quotes about intervention page 2

Quotes about intervention
page 2