Quotes about underwriting

A collection of quotes on the topic of underwriting, other.

Other

Quotes about underwriting

“The world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: The world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.
So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another — that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

War , World , Help

“Evil's just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it's that simple. And we have fire, and there there's hail. Underwriters lump it all under 'Acts of God.”

Thomas Harris The Silence of the Lambs

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

God , Evil

“Almost alone among cognitive-aesthetic movements and strategies of interpretation, deconstruction neither champions any body of past literature or art, nor does it act as vanguard or advocate for any contemporary or incipient school. The New Criticism and T. S. Eliot strove for the revaluation of Metaphysical poetry so as to underwrite, in turn, certain tactics of modenity. Aristotle was advocate for Sophocles. Deconstruction is, intentionally, marginal (a key trope) to all histories of taste and manifestos for innovation.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 7 (p. 117).

School , Art , History , Literature

“Edmund Gettier convinced most philosophers that the received wisdom of millennia about the concept of knowledge was mistaken: “knowledge” was not simply a matter of having a justified, true belief … A justified true belief isn’t “knowledge” when the justification for the true belief isn’t the cause of why the agent holds the belief. As Philip Kitcher put the point, in explaining the stimulus Gettier provided to the “naturalistic” turn in epistemology: “the epistemic status of a belief state depends on the etiology of the state.” … We can understand, now, the logic of the hermeneutics of suspicion as exploiting precisely this point about the epistemic status of belief: we should be suspicious of the epistemic status of beliefs that have the wrong causal etiology. That’s the lesson of the Gettier counter-examples, and it is the lesson which underwrites the suspicion that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud recommend by way of providing alternative causal trajectories to explain our beliefs. To be sure, beliefs with the wrong causal etiology might be true; but since they are no longer cases of knowledge, we have no reason to presume that to be the case.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Wisdom , Way , Understanding , Knowledge

“We know that there are people for whom the country and a certain rather mediocre dynasty are in effect unimaginable without one another. There is no need to doubt or mock the sincerity of the conviction. However, there is no reason in our history or our literature to endorse or underwrite it either. We possess an alternative tradition which is capable of outlasting this royal house as it has already outlasted others.”

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

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

People , History , Literature , Housing

“[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

“In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism.”

Andrew Bacevich (1947) United States Army officer

Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (2013).

Way

“World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U. S. A. are not producing any real wealth—i. e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc.”

Buckminster Fuller book Critical Path

Pg 223. - Google Books Result https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0312174918 - 1982 - ‎History
From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Life , World , Fear , Game

“I'm increasingly convinced that the principal moral errors of contemporary western societies, especially among elites, are rooted in the triumph of Hobbes' view of human beings as basically machines for having experiences. It's the anthropology underwriting the Age of Feeling.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/947851434816655361 (1 January 2018)
2018

Age , Error , Feeling