Quotes about offense
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“I'm a Jew under reformed Judaism, not orthodox. Life is struggle. Winners are hated. Jews win by sticking together against divided gentiles. Jews love persecution. It justifies offense and reinforces the need for strength in numbers to divide and conquer gentiles”

Mark Schultz (wrestler)

non-jews 14 August 2018 https://twitter.com/MarkSchultzy/status/1029608548731244544

Love, Life, Hate

“In the course of the article I described the 'god' worshiped by terrorists as 'a monkey god.' I was wrong and that was offensive. I owe an apology to millions of Hindus who worship Lord Hanuman, an actual Monkey God… Hanuman is worshiped as a symbol of perseverance, strength and devotion. He is known as a destroyer of evil and to inspire and liberate. Those are hardly the traits of whatever the Hell (literally) it is that terrorists worship and worthy of my respect and admiration not ridicule.”

Mark Williams American conservative activist, radio talk show host and author

Williams's "correction" to the previous statement.

God, Hell, Evil, Perseverance

“The Entertainment Industry on Planet Earth had decided that in order to acquire Layer 7 Data Security, it was necessary to lock up layers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 so that no technological progress could occur without their permission. This was known by the IT Industry and the Consumer Electronics Industry on the planet to be offensive nonsense, but there was no counterweight to it, and there was no organised consumer dissent sufficient to require them to stand up for technical merit and their own right to run their own businesses without dictation from companies a tenth their size. Not surprisingly, since it is part of the role we play in this political power concentrated in poverty, humility, and sanctity, we brought them to a consensus they were unable to bring themselves to - which is represented in the license by a rule which fundamentally says "If you want to experiment with locking down layer below 7 in the pursuit of data networks inside businesses that keep the business's data at home, you may do so freely, we have no objection - not only do we have no objection to you doing it, we've no objection to your using our parts to do it with. But when you use our parts to build machines which control peoples' daily lives - which provide them with education and culture, build devices which are modifiable by them to the same extent that they're modifiable by you. That's all we want. If you can modify the device after you give it to them, then they must be able to modify the device after you give it to them - that's a price for using our parts. That's a deal which has been accepted.”

Eben Moglen (1959) American law professor and free software advocate

Talk titled The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3, Edinburgh, Scotland, June 26, 2007 http://www.archive.org/details/EbenMoglenLectureEdinburghJune2007text.

People, Education, Home, Business

“In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2002

Personality

“Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 102.

Life, Universe

“We face threats to freedom of expression if we are unable or unwilling to rise to the challenge of freedom of expression, when that freedom is exercised. We are all of us—especially those who gather at a book fair—quick to announce to the world that we’re champions of freedom of expression. But when we regard someone’s expression as offensive, why do we seek to silence them? Why is it not enough simply to condemn what they say as offensive and leave untouched their right to say it?”

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist

"Ashok Kumar Sarkar Memorial Lecture 2015" Jan 29, 2015 http://ziahaiderrahman.com/aks/. Retrieved on 2015-02-12.

Books, World, Exercises, Freedom

“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)

“It's a heck of an honor considering the other quarterbacks in the league and the other AFC offensive players that are in the AFC. I'm wowed by it right now. I couldn't have done it without the other 10 guys.”

Scott Zolak (1967) American football quarterback

After winning AFC Player of the Week honors after his first career start at quarterback for the then-winless New England Patriots against the Indianapolis Colts in November 1992, going 20-29 for 261 yards, two touchdowns and an interception. [Terry, Price, Zolak named AFC player of the week, The Hartford Courant, D2, November 19, 1992]

Guy

“I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2004, 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action, 2004

“Of the ten crimes which Biblical Hebrew law punished by stoning, nine have ceased to be offenses in modern society.”

Joseph Lewis (1889–1968) American activist

The Ten Commandments ("The Eighth Commandment")

Law

“Of crimes injurious to the persons of private subjects, the most principal and important is the offense of taking away that life, which is the immediate gift of the great creator; and which therefore no man can be entitled to deprive himself or another of, but in some manner either expressly commanded in, or evidently deducible from, those laws which the creator has given us; the divine laws, I mean, of either nature or revelation.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Book IV, ch. 14 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk4ch14.asp: Of Homicide. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

Life, Law, Nature, Personality

“I love animals deeply… They are my friends. Animals have a great sense of community, friendship, not to mention strong family bonds, paternal and maternal instincts. Especially in America, the farming and slaughtering of tens of millions of animals in cruel and barbaric ways is offensive and unfathomable. Many animals are sick and diseased when led to slaughter, giving the ultimate sacrifice for our hungry pleasures. They have been separated and disconnected from their family members, and grieve the great loss of those close to them.”

Kristoff St. John (1966–2019) American actor

"Why I'm Vegan", on his official Facebook page (31 August 2014) https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10154508997590487&id=78458960486.

Love, Friendship, Pleasure, Disease

“The Hindus lost Kabul for good only in the closing decade of the 10th century. In AD 963 Alaptigin, a Turkish slave of the succeeding Samanid dynasty, had been able to establish an independent Muslim principality in Kabul with his seat at Ghazni. It was his general and successor, Subuktigin, who conquered Kabul after a struggle spread over two decades. The Hindus under king Jayapala of Udbhandapur made a bold bid to recapture Kabul in AD 986-987. A confederate Hindu army to which the Rajas of Delhi, Ajmer, Kalinjar and Kanauj has contributed troops and money, advanced into the heartland of the Islamic kingdom of Ghazni. “According to Utbi, the battle lasted several days and the warriors of Subuktigin, including prince Mahmood, were ‘reduced to despair.’ But a snow-storm and rains upset the plans of Jayapala who opened negotiations for peace. He sent the following message to Subuktigin: ‘You have heard and know the nobleness of Indians - they fear not death or destruction… In affairs of honour and renown we would place ourselves upon the fire like roast meat, and upon the dagger like the sunrays.’” But the peace thus concluded proved temporary. The Muslims resumed the offensive and the Hindus were defeated and driven out of Kabul. Dr. Mishra concludes with the comment that Jayapala “was perhaps the last Indian ruler to show such spirit of aggression, so sadly lacking in later Rajput kings.””

Jayapala (964–1001) Ruler of the Kabal Shabi

S.R. Goel, (1994) Heroic Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders, 636 AD to 1206 AD. ISBN 9788185990187 , quoting Ram Gopal Misra, Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D. (1983).

Death, Money, Fear, Peace

“I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book… I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.”

Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) historian

Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (Quartet Books, 1990), p. 142.

Books, Understanding, Thinking, Reading

“There were daily quarrels all summer. The point upon which we had our final disagreement was the decision of an offensive on the Caucasus and Stalingrad - a mistake, and Hitler didn't want to see it. I told him the Russians would put in another million men in 1942 and get another million in 1943. Hitler told me that I was an idiot - that the Russians were practically dead already. When I told Hitler about Russian armament potentials, especially for tank materials, Hitler flew into a rage of fury and threatened me with his fists.”

Franz Halder (1884–1972) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, April 12, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
Sourced Encyclopedia of the Third Reich Louis L. Snyder

Men, Decision, Rage, Summer

“Imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so called, will there be unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousnesses. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define these acts as criminal and will treat them as such.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 68-69

Imagination, Appearance, Perfection

“I’m tired of being told that Islam is a “Religion of Peace,” when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family “honor;” of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren’t “believers;” of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for “adultery;” of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur’an and Shari’a law tells them to.”

Robert A. Hall (1946) American politician

I'm Tired (February 19, 2009)

Death, Men, School, Family

“The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.”

Steve Allen (1921–2000) American comedian, actor, musician and writer

Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality (1990)

Women, War, Truth, Evil

“The government should not be in the business of deciding what is moral, immoral or offensive. The section of the trademark act in question in this case is a leftover from Victorian times, and is used now primarily, I would argue, (and have argued) to promote social agendas with coercive censorship. I do not trust any government to tell me what I can and cannot handle. The marketplace of ideas will do that for us.”

Marc Randazza (1969) American writer

Idea, Question, Business, Time

“To the modern Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die in such numbers over mere differences of religion; there have to be some other “genuine” reasons underneath the religious veil. We are prepared to allow religiously defined conflicts to accredited eccentrics like the Northern Irish, but to admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary loyalty is too much. Even to suggest such a thing is regarded as offensive by liberal opinion, always ready to take protective umbrage on behalf of those whom it regards as its wards. This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology, the use of which in explaining Muslim political phenomena is about as accurate and as enlightening as an account of a cricket match by a baseball correspondent.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Men, World, Religion, Fight

“The wicked do not fear God from any unwillingness to offend him, provided they could do so with impunity. … But believers, as has been said, dread the offense even more than the punishment.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 27, p. 480
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God, Fear

“… at this point the Catholic church and the various other churches, and there are a number of them, that take the stand of no divorce are definitely not in terms of scripture, at this point they are trying to be holier than God, which I believe is a fearful offense. Now their point is that for these grounds separation is permissible, but this is not in terms of scripture, because scripture clearly permits remarriage.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

God, Fear

“Shouldness is being flouted here,” said Launcelot. “Shouldness is perhaps self-explanatory, but I have never seen it adequately dealt with, either in print or in the lecture hall. When that huntress got me in the bum with an arrow, it was an offense to shouldness. It shouldn’t have gone that way. I told the story to Sir Roger, and now he never tires of telling it, tells it to everyone who comes down the pike. That a knight of the Round Table could be pierced in that way by a female has a significance quite apart from the ludicrous. It’s in the realm of those things which should not happen—a category which holds much philosophical interest, as anyone who has ever looked into anomaletics will recognize. The insult to my dignity was not nearly so grave as the insult to shouldness.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

Source: The King (1990), p. 106.

Way

“Let the punishment match the offense.”
Noxia poena par esto.

Marcus Tullius Cicero book De Legibus

Book III, section 11
De Legibus (On the Laws)

“The president's linguistic infelicities—a word salad, at times—have given the press popinjays and their Washington overlords the foothold needed to go after the president. Throw in the 'bad' habits of a businessman he has retained. Trump transacts with everyone—Russians too. We voted for deals, not wars. This is the sum and substance of President Trump's offenses. That, and beating Hillary Clinton to the White House.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump Fends Off 'Showboat' Comey And The Federal Zombies," http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/06/trump_fends_off_showboat_comey_and_the_federal_zombies.html The American Thinker, June 9, 2017. 2010s, 2017

War, Time, Housing

“Nor is the Navy content to rest on its present laurels. Long a leader in invention and research, our Navy is already studying new weapons, new methods- the atomic bomb and guided missiles, for instance. Whatever new weapons, or defenses against new weapons, science can develop, the U. S. Navy intends to incorporate them into itself to make sure that the Navy shall always be strong enough to perform its historic function of defense of our own country and of offense against enemy countries. It is to be hoped that every American will exert his effort and influence to see that goal is achieved- that the U. S. Navy will always remain, as it is today, the world's greatest sea power.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

From King's Foreword in Battle Stations! Your Navy In Action (1946) by Admirals of the U.S. Navy, p. 10

World, Hope, Effort, Study

“For if liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation and free speech over offense.”

Maajid Nawaz (1977) British activist

Stop the Jihadi Onslaught Against Atheists and Freethinkers http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/13/stop-the-muslim-onslaught-against-atheists-and-free-thinkers.html?via=desktop&source=facebook (13 October 2015) Daily Beast Column

Support

“In representing criminal defendants—especially guilty ones—it is often necessary to take the offensive against the government: to put the government on trial for its misconduct. In law, as in sports, the best defense is often a good offense.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

Law, Sport

“The remarks attributed to John Podesta, who is Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, are just extraordinarily patronizing and insulting to Catholics. What he would say is offensive. And if it had been said about the Jewish community, if it had been said about the Islamic community, within 10 minutes there would have been an apology.”

Timothy M. Dolan (1950) American Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church

Timothy M. Dolan, Cardinal Dolan Blasts Hillary Clinton’s Catholic Bashing: It is “Patronizing and Insulting to Catholics” http://www.lifenews.com/2016/10/21/cardinal-dolan-blasts-hillary-clintons-catholic-bashing-it-is-patronizing-and-insulting-to-catholics/ (October 21, 2016)

Communication

“Now, fornication has come to mean premarital sex almost exclusively in modern English, but this is not its meaning in the Greek, nor the meaning of uncleanness or nakedness of a thing in the Hebrew. Now, since every act of extramarital sex by a husband or wife with a person of the opposite sex is adultery, even though it might be also perversion or it might be incest, it is still adultery. To use a word other than adultery means something else than merely sexual offenses. It refers to this fact of lasciviousness and rebelliousness, and unbelief.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Sex, Personality

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

"An Expedition to the Pole", Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

Life, God, Children, Idea

“Deeply as many people deplored the policy which at a critical moment in European history gave Hitler a free hand in the East to develop his ambitious schemes of domination, strongly opposed as we were to many features of the Soviet system, we had no hesitation in proclaiming that as enemies of our enemies we should do all we could to help the Russian people in their fight. … It was not unlikely that Hitler hoped to be able to launch from Moscow a great peace offensive. He would like to proclaim himself the saviour of Europe from Bolshevism. … He would deceive no one in the Government. The great mass of the people in this country and in the countries of the British Commonwealth and Empire would not be deceived. We would not make peace with the Nazi gang because such a peace would be no peace. It would be a betrayal of everything for which this country stood.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Neath, South Wales (13 July 1941) after the German invasion of Russia, quoted in The Times (14 July 1941), p. 2.
War Cabinet

People, Peace, Hope, History

“We're importing Hinduism into America. The whole thought of your karma, of meditation, of the fact that there's no end of life and there's this endless wheel of life, this is all Hinduism. Chanting too. Many of those chants are to Hindu Gods — Vishnu, Hare Krishna. The origin of it is all demonic. We can't let that stuff come into America. We've got the best defense, if you will — a good offense.”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/pat_quotes/hindus.htm

Life, God

“It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect.”

Truman Capote book Other Voices, Other Rooms

At Jesus Fever's funeral
Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)

Flowers, Nature

“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. it is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor it is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view" that some people with soft skins find "offensive." it is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth an human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of whole ness or internal integrity.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 9

Life, Women, People, Affliction

“You ask a thing ill-suited to my years, to yours both offensive and disgusting. For how can it become me, who am near forty, to write of love, or you, that are in your fifties, to read of it That is a subject which delights young minds, and demands a tender heart. Old men are as fitted to tales of love as young men are to tales of prudence. Nor is there anything uglier than old age pursuing love, but lacking strength. Certainly you will sometimes find old men in love,—loved again, never; matrons and girls alike despise old age. No man’s love will hold a woman, but his whom she has seen in the flower of his youth. And if you hear aught to the contrary, there’s a lie behind it. Indeed I know, to write of love does not beseem me, who have already passed the noonday of life and am carried on towards evening; but it dishonours you who ask no less than me who write.”

Pope Pius II book The Tale of Two Lovers

Source: The Tale of Two Lovers, 1444, p. xvii, preface (in 1933 edition)

Love, Life, Men, Lie

“Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.””

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Prologue (p. 6)
Evolution (2002)

Thinking

“You please me much by saying that no other fault [in the portrait Gainsborough recently made and sent] is to be found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance.... I urn [earn? ] much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an inch out of its place or a nose out of drawing when view'd at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture. For Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that pictures were not made to smell of..”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in Gainborough's letter, March 1758 from Ipswich, to a correspondent in the neighbouring town of Colchester; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, pp. 20-21 1755 - 1769

Thinking, Parting, Hurt, Drawing

“In his effort toward revivification of this sense [the sense for great art], the modern artist has not infrequently retired into himself; he has accepted isolation or even alienation. … Sometimes the good has to go underground. … The “revolutionary” artist … has had the aim of saving himself from the surrounding forces of sentimentality and vulgarity. … It is impossible to make a deal with these forces, and we should not be surprised if in striking back the artist has done so in ways even intended to be offensive. He has sometimes shown defiance and contempt toward those who would deny his level of seriousness.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” pp. 30-31.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Art, Way, Sense, Effort

“It is a ridiculous notion to assert that because the United States is on the offense, more people want to hurt us. We are on the offense because people do want to hurt us.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks on Intelligence Reform, at the Rose Garden http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040802-2.html, August 2, 2004 2000s, 2004

People, Hurt

“Thus we see that the child is almost led to tell lies — or what seem to us lies from our point of view — by the very structure of his spontaneous thought. Given this situation, what will be the result of the laws laid down by adults about truthfulness? On the occasion of the first very obvious lies, or of those connected with some offense or other and told therefore with the object of averting punishment or scolding, the parents point out to the child that he has just done something very wrong and thus inculcate in him the respect for truth.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism

Truth, Law, Parent

“Question: YouTube was blocked at one point last week and was available again from China, and now it seems to be blocked again. There are speculations that it links to the release of video from the “Tibetan Government in Exile”. Do you have any comment on that? Is there any particular offensive material on YouTube right now that causes it to be blocked again?”

Qin Gang (1966) politician

Question

“The enemy had achieved in South Vietnam neither military nor psychological victory. For the South Vietnamese the Tet offensive served as a unifying catalyst, a Pearl Harbor. Had it been the same for the American people, had President Johnson discerned the same support behind him that Thieu did behind him, and had he acted with forcefulness, the enemy could have been induced to engage in serious and meaningful negotiations. Unfortunately, the enemy scored in the United States the psychological victory that eluded him in Vietnam, so influencing President Johnson and his civilian advisors that they ignored the maxim that when the enemy is hurting, you don't diminish the pressure, you increase it.”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 334.

People, Support, Victory, Hurt

“What is never discussed at all it is never considered is an offense committed by a non-Muslim in a non-Muslim country. That, according to the unanimous opinion of all of the doctors of the holy law is no concern of Islamic law, which brings us back to the case of Denmark. Does this mean that Denmark, along with the rest of Europe is now considered part of the Islamic lands, and that the Danes, like the rest, are therefore dhimmis, non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state? I think this is an interesting question, which can lead to several possible lines of inquiry.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

Law, Question, Thinking, Parting

“Between October 2012 and October 2014, despite making up only 67 percent of the population, African Americans accounted for a little over 85 percent of all traffic stops by the Ferguson Police Department. African Americans were twice as likely as white residents to be searched during a routine traffic stop, even though they were 26 percent less likely to carry contraband. Between October 2012 and July 2014, 35 black individuals – and zero white individuals – received five or more citations at the same time. During the same period, African Americans accounted for fully 85 percent of the total charges brought by the Ferguson Police Department. African Americans made up over 90 percent of those charged with a highly-discretionary offense described as “Manner of Walking Along Roadway.” And the use of dogs by Ferguson police appears to have been exclusively reserved for African Americans; in every case in which Ferguson police records recorded the race of a person bit by a police dog, that person was African American.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Dogs, Search, Appearance, Time

“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

letter, 22 April 1949, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

Life, Failure, Success

“Taking offense has become America’s national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Column, May 7, 2014, "Thin skins and legislative prayer" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-thin-skins-and-prayer-in-supreme-court-case/2014/05/07/a5049a64-d54c-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html at washingtonpost.com. 2010s

Life, People, Feeling, Idea

“Today, Keynesian theorizing does not inspire whispers and giggles from the audience. There are many economists under the age of forty who do not take offense when their work is called ‘Keynesian’, and I count myself as one of them. If Keynesian economics was dead in 1980, then today it has been reincarnated.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

N. Gregory Mankiw, "The reincarnation of Keynesian economics", European Economic Review (1992).
1990s

Age, Dead

“Terrorism is trying to paralyze and silence democracies fighting against it, exactly as was manifest in the world's reaction to Israel's counter-terrorist offensive Cast Lead in light of the Goldstone Report.”

Reuven Rivlin (1939) Israeli politician, 10th President of Israel

Israel national news http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136165#.U5g1Yfl_uch, 23 February 2010

World, Democracy, Light, Silence

“What is most needed today is a fundamental theological thinking, one centered upon the Godhead itself, and centered upon that which is most challenging or most offensive in the Godhead, one which has truly been veiled in the modern world, except by our most revolutionary thinkers and visionaries. If we allow Blake and Nietzsche to be paradigmatic of those revolutionaries, nowhere else does such a centering upon God or the Godhead occur, although a full parallel to this occurs in Spinoza and Hegel; but the language of Hegel and Spinoza is not actually offensive, or not in its immediate impact, whereas the language of Nietzsche and Blake is the most purely offensive language which has ever been inscribed. Above all this is true of the theological language of Blake and Nietzsche, but here a theological language is a truly universal language, one occurring in every domain, and occurring as that absolute No which is the origin of every repression and every darkness, and a darkness which is finally the darkness of God, or the darkness of that Godhead which is beyond “God.” Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy.”

Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927–2018) American radical theologian

Godhead and the Nothing (2003), Preface

God, World, Thinking, Universe

“Macro rational expectations, as I have labeled the hypothesis, seems to say that expectations in an economist's model must be perfectly consistent with his model that embodies these expectations. In other words, the agents of his model must all share his views of the relevant economic mechanisms, as well as his data. Why? Because if he holds them they must believe they are God's truth and, if so, rational people can have no other views (and of course we should never ask how they would come by these views and data, that not even other specialists may have heard of yet, let alone accepted). I submit that this view is pretty absurd--I would almost say offensive! I certainly believe that I know more about economics and the economy than (almost) everybody else, and i can even prove it: If everybody shared my vies, then the economy could not be in today's troubles”

Franco Modigliani (1918–2003) Italian-American economist

though it might conceivably be in some different ones!
Conversations with Economists (1983)

God, People, Truth

“We--by whom I mean anyone over sixty--commit two offenses just bu existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk to slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drugs barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish", p. 315 (Nook edition)
Cloud Atlas (2004)

World, Business

“Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 7, The Offshore Balancers, p. 252

“We take nothing from the womb but pure filth [meras sordes]. The seething spring of sin is so deep and abundant that vices are always bubbling up form it to bespatter and stain what is otherwise pure…. We should remember that we are not guilty of one offense only but are buried in innumerable impurities…. all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement…. they are always spattered and befouled with many stains…. it is certain that there is no one who is not covered with infinite filth.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

In John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, 1989, William J. Bouwsma, Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN 0195059514 ISBN 9780195059519, p. 36. http://books.google.com/books?id=ADdQiBaLW_kC&pg=PA36&dq=%22We+take+nothing+from+the+womb+but+pure+filth+%22&hl=en&ei=iu9lTJbUNsL48AbKt92DCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22We%20take%20nothing%20from%20the%20womb%20but%20pure%20filth%20%22&f=false

Spring

“David Dimbleby: You couldn't - you couldn't set our minds at rest on the vexed question of what the Sunday Times did actually pay you for the book?
Harold Wilson: No, I don't think it's a matter of interest to the BBC or to anybody else.
Dimbleby: But why..
Wilson: If you're interested in these things, you'd better find out how people buy yachts. Do you ask that question? Did you ask him how he was able to pay for a yacht?
Dimbleby: I haven't interviewed …
Wilson: Have you asked him that question?
Dimbleby: I haven't interviewed him.
Wilson: Well, has the BBC ever asked that question?
Dimbleby: I don't know …
Wilson: Well, what's it got to do with you, then?
Dimbleby: I imagine they have..
Wilson: Why you ask these question, I mean why, if people can afford to buy £25,000 yachts, do the BBC not regard that as a matter for public interest? Why do you insult me with these questions here?
Dimbleby: It's only that it's been a matter of..
Wilson: All I'm saying, all I'm saying..
Dimbleby: … public speculation, and I was giving you an opportunity if you wanted to, to say something about it.
Wilson: It was not a matter of speculation, it was just repeating press gossip. You will not put this question to Mr. Heath. When you have got an answer to him, come and put the question to me. And this last question and answer are not to be recorded. Is this question being recorded?
Dimbleby: Well it is, because we're running film.
Wilson: Well, will you cut it out or not? All right, we stop now. No, I'm sorry, I'm really not having this. I'm really not having this. The press may take this view, that they wouldn't put this question to Heath but they put it to me; if the BBC put this question to me, without putting it to Heath, the interview is off, and the whole programme is off. I think it's a ridiculous question to put. Yes, and I mean it cut off, I don't want to read in the Times Diary or miscellany that I asked for it to be cut out. [pause]
Dimbleby: All right, are we still running? Can I ask you this, then, which I mean, I.. let me put this question, I mean if you find this question offensive then..
Wilson: Coming to ask if your curiosity can be satisfied, I think it's disgraceful. Never had such a question in an interview in my life before.
Dimbleby: I.. [gasps]
Joe Haines (Wilson's Press Secretary): Well, let's stop now, and we can talk about it, shall we?
Dimbleby: No, let's.. well, I mean, we'll keep going, I think, don't you?
Wilson: No, I think we'll have a new piece of film in and start all over again. But if this film is used, or this is leaked, then there's going to be a hell of a row. And this must be..
Dimbleby: Well, I certainly wouldn't leak it..
Wilson: You may not leak it but these things do leak. I've never been to Lime Grove without it leaking.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Exchange with BBC interviewer David Dimbleby recorded for a documentary called "Yesterday's Men" broadcast on 16 June 1971. The BBC did agree not to show this portion of the interview, but Wilson's fears of a leak were justified as a transcript was published on page 1 of The Times on June 18, 1971. A fuller transcript appeared in Private Eye during 1972.
Leader of the Opposition

Life, People, Books, Imagination

“When an attacking force laid siege to a castle, they used techniques and weapons not unlike those developed by the ancient Romans. First they surrounded the castle in order to cut off all avenues of escape and resupply. They also built a camp ringed by ditches and palisades to secure their own position. Then they built siege engines—great stonethrowing devices—which they hoped would break down the castle walls. Although the knights’ chivalric code gave pride of place in warfare to a charge on horseback with lance or to hand-to-hand combat with swords, military engineers skilled in the mechanics of offensive engines had to first break through the walls. To breach the walls the army used battering rams, various kinds of projectiles, and mines. In other words they tried to go through, over, or under the walls.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Source: Medieval castles (2005), Ch. 2 : The Castle as Fortress : The Castle and Siege Warfare

Hope

“It is dangerous these days for a male to write even glancingly on feminist themes. Did anyone attack Margaret Atwood’s right to extrapolate religio-machismo in The Handmaid’s Tale? Women writers appear vouchsafed insight into the souls of men—credit that seldom flows the other way. It is a sexist and offensive assumption, which does not advance understanding.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 561)
Glory Season (1993)

Women, Men, Way, Soul

“I have read your letter of October 26th with great care and welcomed the statement of your desire to seek a prompt solution to the problem. The first thing that needs to be done, however, is for work to cease on offensive missile bases on Cuba and for all weapons systems in Cuba capable of offensive use to be rendered inoperable, under effective United Nations arrangements.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, Second Letter to Nikita Khrushchev

Problem, Reading

“Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offenses.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Democritus Junior to the Reader

“Imagine […] that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests." Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence. Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, ten more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. […] The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Imagine by Ron Paul http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul512.html (11 March 2009). 2000s, 2006-2009

Women, Children, People, Fear

“In one decade, women had gotten more protection against offensive jokes in the workplace than men had gotten in centuries against being killed in the workplace.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 288.

Women, Men

“From the invention of the cotton-gin slavery became a progressive system — not passively tolerated as in process of extinction, but actively striving for development and extension. It became a conscious political power. It made no offensive professions. It still deprecated itself as an evil, so difficult to deal with, and, with an adroit allusion to Ham and Onesimus, it smoothed the ecclesiastical conscience of the country and only asked to be let alone. And it was let alone. The War of 1812, and the consequent commercial confusion and renewed devotion to trade, held the country torpid upon the subject. If anybody looked at slavery inquisitively, it folded its hands demurely upon its breast and said, 'I am such a dreadful thing! How unfortunate that I should exist! What can be done with me? Just please to let me alone, that is all I want. A leper, you see; a miserable leper!”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

War, Evil, Country

“I'd like to see people try to sample the sound less and try to sample the style a bit more. Some people see this sort of 'copying' as offensive… I'm inclined to think the opposite - all music is built on imitation and expansion.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Static Line interview, 1998

People, Music, Thinking

“I don't say that the Milwaukee Brewers are nothing, but I think the offense of the Cincinnati Reds (is) better. There's no making mistakes when pitching against Cincinnati. When you make a mistake against them, you pay for it. When you make a mistake against Milwaukee, sometimes they miss it and that's good.”

Carlos Zambrano (1981) Venezuelan baseball pitcher

Jenkins, Chris, Chi Cubs 6, Milwaukee 3 http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/recap?gid=270407108, Yahoo! Sports, Retrieved on June 15, 2007 2007

Thinking

“Bobby Knight told me this: "There is nothing that a good defense—cannot beat a better offense." In other words a good offense wins.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Speech to the City Club of Chicago (8 September 1988)

“What happens then when majorities in the directly elected European Assembly take decisions, or approve policies, or vote budgets which are regarded by the British electorate or by the electorate of some of the mammoth constituencies as highly offensive and prejudicial to their interests? What do the European MPs say to their constituents? They say: “Don't blame me; I had no say, nor did I and my Labour (or Conservative) colleagues, have any say in the framing of these policies”. He will then either add: “Anyhow, I voted against”; or alternatively he will add: “And don't misunderstand if I voted for this along with my German, French, and Italian pals, because if I don't help roll their logs, I shall never get them to roll any of mine”. What these pseudo-MPs will not be able to say is what any MP in a democracy must be able to say, namely, either “I voted against this, and if the majority of my party are elected next time, we will put it right”, or alternatively, “I supported this because it is part of the policy and programme for which a majority in this constituency and in the country voted at the last election and which we shall be proud to defend at the next election”. Direct elections to the European Assembly, so far from introducing democracy and democratic control, will strengthen the arbitrary and bureaucratic nature of the Community by giving a fallacious garb of elective authority to the exercise of supranational powers by institutions and persons who are – in the literal, not the abusive, sense of the word – irresponsible.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Brighton (24 October 1977), from Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), pp. 19-20.
1970s

Exercises, Democracy, Communication, Support

“I know the rigors of the NBA and what these guys can expect. I know my job is to prepare them, to get them in shape. We'll find a good offense and a good defense. And then let's do it.”

Larry Bird (1956) basketball player and coach

Bob Ryan (October 31, 1997) "Bird Setting Feverish Pace With Indiana", Boston Globe, p. E1.

Guy

“What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Ch. 13

Life, Girl, Business, Thinking

“SUSPEND ALL OFFENSIVE ACTION. REMAIN ALERT.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

King's final wartime message to Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander, United States Pacific Fleet, sent by cable on August 14, 1945. As quoted in American Warlords: How Roosevelt's High Command Led America To Victory In World War II (2016), p. 467.

“The German air offensives against British cities in World Wars I and II not only failed to coerce the United Kingdom to surrender, but Germany also lost both wars.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 4, The Primacy of Land Power, p. 99

War, World

“The well understood equity as well as interest of society demand that we work on much more to prevent crime and offenses than to punish them.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 52.

“I find the speech in this case patently offensive, hateful, and insulting. The Court should not, however, gloss over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it does not like.”

Sonia Sotomayor (1954) U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2002) (dissenting).

Hate, Freedom

“I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate… I do not blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book [The Hindus: An Alternative History]. Penguin, India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a w:Lawsuitcriminal suit. They were finally defeated by the true villain of this piece – the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Wendy Doniger, In: India: PEN protests withdrawal of best-selling book http://fleursdumal.nl/mag/category/news-events/page/12, Fleursdumal.org Her book [The Hindus: An Alternative History] became controversial and Dinanath Batra of Shiksha Bachao Andolan filed a case against the publisher, claiming that the book was offensive to Hindus and therefore in violation of Section 295A of the Indian penal code which prohibits ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.'

Books, Law, Disappointment, History

“Listening to nasty remarks about me or my work doesn’t feel good. I don’t enjoy being unpopular, however in order to think freely, I must be willing to risk being unpopular. To think, I must risk being offensive. Anyway, most people are not listening but instead projecting.”

Vincent Gallo (1961) American film director, writer, model, actor and musician

Another Man Essay

People, Feeling, Thinking

“Competition with women is almost always a net loss of honor for a man. Men don't consider competition between men and women to be "apples to apples." I don't think women do either… What does a man have to gain? He shows no courage by entering the ring with a woman. He is expected to win. If he does, his victory is shallow and unsavory. He gains no honor in beating a woman- the idea is offensive even to a modern man's vestigial sense of chivalry.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 75
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Women, Men, Idea, Courage

“I strongly object to the fact that this stupid operation in the Ardennes is sometimes called the 'Rundstedt Offensive'. This is a complete misnomer. I had nothing to do with it. It came to me as an order complete to the last detail. Hitler had even written on the plan in his own handwriting "not to be altered."”

Gerd von Rundstedt (1875–1953) German Field Marshal during World War II

Quoted in "Churchill and Hitler: Essays on the Political-Military Direction of Total War" - Page 194 - by David Jablonsky - History - 1994

Stupidity

“The whole point of female concealment in Islamic society is that men are not expected to take responsibility for their sexual urges, so any woman who is not covered up from head to toe is asking to be raped. The burka, therefore, legitimises rape. It apologises for rape. It justifies rape. Are you listening, feminists? And this makes it, in my opinion, as offensive a public statement as a Ku Klux Klan uniform or a Nazi swastika, and I think it should be treated with exactly the same revulsion and contempt.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Apologists for evil" (23 June 2009) http://youtube.com/watch?v=G4FpTvp0tgs 2009

Men, Thinking

“He who pardons easily invites offense.”

Pierre Corneille Cinna

Auguste, act IV, scene ii.
Cinna (1641)

“I'm not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they've been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they've been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn't be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that's really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

The Sean Hannity Show
Radio
2011-04-27 quoted in * Rand Paul, Supposed Defender Of Civil Liberties, Calls For Jailing People Who Attend ‘Radical Political Speeches’
Alex
Seitz-Wald
2011-05-31
ThinkProgress
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/31/232182/rand-paul-criminalize-speech/
2011-06-02
2010s

People, Religion, Color, Travel

“When I see that man on the telly — 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' No! I'm definitely not! I find most of it quite offensive!”

John Prescott (1938) Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1997–2007)

Referring to the slogan used by Michael Howard during the 2005 General Election campaign, as quoted in "Election 2005: Aggressive and voluble — but the real thing" by Oliver Burkeman, in The Guardian (21 April 2005), p. 6

Thinking

“A service beyond all recompense
Weighs so heavy that it almost gives offense.”

Pierre Corneille Suréna

Un service au-dessus de toute récompense
À force d'obliger tient presque lieu d'offense.
Orode, Suréna (1674), act III, scene I.

“The Bible declares blasphemy to be a very serious offense, because any society which begins by profaning God and His authority will soon profane all things. Nothing will be sacred. No authority will stand. The alternative to authority is total terror by the power of State. This is why, as I’ve pointed out more than once, when the authority of God is destroyed, and when the doctrine of Creation was replaced with the doctrine of Evolution, Marx and Engels congratulated one another in that now their position was established. The foundations of all godly authority were shattered when God was no longer viewed as the creator. His Law, His Word, His person became thereby irrelevant to creation. If the Lord God of scripture did not make the Heavens and the earth and all things therein to the last atom, His Word does not govern creation. If Creation is a product of Evolution, then no law outside of itself can govern it. So the alternative to the authority of God is total terror by the power of State. Where there is no authority, there is soon no justice, because men then no longer speak the same moral languages of law and authority. The respect for God’s authority establishes communication and healthy dissent, the kind of dissent which thrives in an anarchist situation is the dissent of increasing evil, violence and destruction. Godly dissent is constructive, not destructive, and its goal is justice and holiness.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Blasphemy (n. d.)

Men, God, Justice, Law

“On all the matters that touch upon the critical moral issues, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the evil side. This is a fact. A mere list of the positions he supports is enough to make this plain: abortion as a "right," cloning of human beings, governmental classification of citizens by race, public benefits for sexual partners outside of marriage, disrespect for property rights against environmental extremism, repudiation of the right to bear arms — no more need be said to show that this candidate is wrong where human decency, human rights and human responsibility bear directly on political issues. Last week, we saw Schwarzenegger does not deny habitual crude offenses against young women. Rather, he theatrically, vaguely and impersonally apologizes for them, before a roaring crowd of adoring fans, admitting neither any connection between action and character, nor any need for genuine penance or reformation. The Republicans who vote for Schwarzenegger will owe Bill Clinton an apology for having given the nation the impression that they sincerely believed character to be an issue for those claiming high office.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

" Arnold's corruption of Republican Party http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/columns/03_10_06wnd.htm", WorldNetDaily, October 6, 2003. Miscellaneous

Women, Marriage, Support, Evil

“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan… We will defend ourselves on every front, defensively and offensively.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Press conference http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-finally-speaks-his-mind/. 2010s, 2014

People, Understanding, Thinking

“Of all these offenses the one that is most widely, frequently, and vehemently denounced is undoubtedly imperialism—sometimes just Western, sometimes Eastern (that is, Soviet) and Western alike. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not—as for Western critics—the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law. This may help us to understand the current troubles in such diverse places as Ethiopian Eritrea, Indian Kashmir, Chinese Sinkiang, and Yugoslav Kossovo, in all of which Muslim populations are ruled by non-Muslim governments. It may also explain why spokesmen for the new Muslim minorities in Western Europe demand for Islam a degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Judaism. Nor, of course, did the governments of the countries of origin of these Muslim spokesmen ever accord such protection to religions other than their own. In their perception, there is no contradiction in these attitudes. The true faith, based on God's final revelation, must be protected from insult and abuse; other faiths, being either false or incomplete, have no right to any such protection.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

God, People, Faith, Religion

“During this campaign, we’ve heard about the two profoundly different futures that could await women. And how one of those futures looks like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

2012 Democratic National Convention

Women, Past, Future

“To be benevolent in speculation, is often to be selfish in action and in reality. The vanity and the indolence of man delude him into a thousand inconsistencies. He professes to love the name and the semblance of virtue, but the labour of exertion and of self-denial terrifies him from attempting it. The emotions of kindness are delightful to his bosom, but then they are little better than a selfish indulgence—they terminate in his own enjoyment—they are a mere refinement of luxury. His eye melts over the picture of fictitious distress, while not a tear is left for the actual starvation and misery with which he is surrounded. It is easy to indulge the imaginations of a visionary heart in going over a scene of fancied affliction, because here there is no sloth to overcome—no avaricious propensity to control—no offensive or disgusting circumstance to allay the unmingled impression of sympathy which a soft and elegant picture is calculated to awaken. It is not so easy to be benevolent in action and in reality, because here there is fatigue to undergo—there is time and money to give — there is the mortifying spectacle of vice, and folly, and ingratitude, to encounter.”

Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) Scottish mathematician and a leader of the Free Church of Scotland

Source: Discourses on the Christian Revelation viewed in connection with the Modern Astronomy together with his sermons... (1818), P. 175.

Love, Money, Imagination, Reality

“Military doctrine is universally, and has been since the time of Napoleon, imbued with the "Spirit of the Offensive." There are some very good reasons for this, which we shall review elsewhere. As with many other ideas which have a sound basis in reason, constant and fervent reiteration has created distortions, like the attitude, for example, which regards a healthy respect for enemy capabilities as defenseminded and hence ignoble.”

Bernard Brodie (1910–1978) American nuclear strategist

Pg. 43
Strategy in the Missile Age

Idea, Universe, Time

“Conditions to the north of us, in the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts zone of action, and our offensive on Kharkov demands that we not lose time and we commit all forces so that we can draw off as many divisions as possible from Kharkov. And even if we do not draw them off, at least we will not give Manstein the ability to take any of his units from our part of the front. If we attract one or two German tank divisions - it will be the best contribution to the defeat of the enemy in the south.”

Aleksandr Vasilevsky (1895–1977) Soviet military commander

To Vasily Chuikov. Quoted in "Soviet Military Deception in the Second World War" - Page 228 - by David M. Glantz - History - 1989.

Time, Parting, Drawing

“Again, when Allaudin Khalji sacked Deogiri, hundreds of Sufis betook themselves to the South and established monasteries, to finance which fat sums were extracted from the local chiefs. Hajji Sayyid alias Sarwar Makhdum, Husam ad-Din, and several other Sufis took part in offensive wars openly, on account of which they were entitled Qattal (the great slayers) and Kuffar-bhanjan (destroyers of the Kafirs). Shaykh Jalal ad-Din Tabrizi demolished a large temple and constructed a Takiyah (khanqah) at Devatalla (Deva Mahal) in Bengal…. Mir Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadani (1314-1385) began to get Hindu temples demolished and the Hindus converted by reckless use of force throughout his sojourn in Kashmir… Thanks to the influence of Hamadani’s Sufi son Mir Muhammad (b. 1372), who stepped into his father’s shoes after the latter had left Kashmir after failing to pull on well with Qutb ad-Din, Sikandar (1389-1413), a liberal Sultan of Kashmir, turned into a ferocious Sultan for the Hindus and began to be known as Sikandar Butshikan (iconoclast), and his powerful Brahmana noble Suhabhatta embraced Islam under the name Sayf ad-Din and became a terror for the Brahmanas. Guided by the teachings of Mir Muhammad, Sikandar played havoc with the Hindus through Sayf ad-Din, destroyed their temples, undertook forcible conversions, and imposed Jizyah on them for the first time in Kashmir. Indeed, he out-Aurangzebed Aurangzeb in his Hindu-persecution-mania.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990)

War, Shoe, Time, Parting

“The reformist project put in place by the U. P. enclosed itself within the bourgeois order…it aimed to forge an alliance with sectors of the bourgeoisie, it didn’t lean on the revolutionary organizations of the working class, in its own organs of popular power, it rejected an alliance with rank and file soldiers and sub officers in the armed forces, it sought to seal an alliance with the bourgeois faction. The reformist illusions allowed the ruling classes to prevail in the superstructure of the state from where it launched its reactionary counter offensive, by, firstly, leaning on industrialist federations, on the petty-bourgeoisie and finally on high-ranking officials of the Chilean Armed Forces…”

Miguel Enríquez (1944–1974) Chilean politician

Answer that Enriquez gave a press conference in October, 1973 when asked: "Accordance to your judgment: Why did the Popular Unity government collapse?"