Words about War

A DI reader named Mike Baker provided me with his collection of quotes on quite a few topics, including a section he titled "War and Peace." It is largely from Mike's collection that I selected the following quotes: War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man. ~Alfred Adler It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them. ~Alfred Adler "In war, truth is the first casualty." ~ Aeschylus A great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. ~Anonymous (German) The terrorist is the one with the small bomb. ~Brendan Behan "War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle." - Thomas Carlyle If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. --Moshe Dayan (1915 - 1981) History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. ~Abba Eban It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. ~Albert Einstein The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. ~Albert Einstein Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. --Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953 [More . . . ]

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New batch of quotes

I really enjoy a good quote; it's like getting a novel in a sentence or two. Here's are some quotes that I've collected over the past couple of months. No particular topic. I hope you enjoy them: “The initial mystery that attends any journey is how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place.” Louise Bogan, Journey Around my Room "The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy." Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) “Things are going to get unimaginably worse, and they are never, ever going to get better again!” Kurt Vonnegut (at a graduation speech) (mentioned by Lawrence Krauss at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo ) To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. Voltaire (1694 - 1778) “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow "It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up." W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), "The Crack-Up" (1936) "My point in Sexual Personae is that one cannot make any kind of firm line between high art and pornography. In fact, porn permeates the high art tradition." Camille Paglia Vamps and Tramps, p. 123 "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today." Lawrence Krauss http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo “A Universe from Nothing” (min 16:40) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss [More . . . ]

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Quotes concerning freedom of speech and freedom of the press

Like many people, I'm a collector of quotes. This batch includes some of my favorite quotes concerning the freedom of speech and press: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.” Benjamin Franklin “The one thing that’s worse than hearing about all that violence and all that bad news on television is not being permitted to hear it.” Charles Kurault "Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment-- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution--not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants"--but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion." John F. Kennedy http://surftofind.com/secrecy “When the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” Thomas Jefferson “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” Thomas Jefferson “If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson “Nothing could be more irrational than to give the people power, and to withhold from them information without which power is abused. A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with power which knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” James Madison “To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been obtained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.” James Madison [More . . . ]

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More quotes

Here are some more quotes I have collected over the past few months. No particular overall topic here: If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you. Don Marquis (1878 - 1937) Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) "I don't believe there's any problem in this country that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can't completely ignore." ~George Carlin The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made. Jean Giraudoux (1882 - 1944) There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980) A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. Segal's Law "Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. Anatole France (1844 - 1924) "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire. If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody. Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976) A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life. Robertson Davies, "What's Bred in the Bone" It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. Alfred Adler (1870 - 1937) I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it. Jack Handey (1949 - ), Deep Thoughts I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. Franklin P. Adams (1881 - 1960) The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983) To the living we owe respect. To the dead we owe only the truth. – Voltaire A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not. Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754) “Why do you write strong female characters?” Answer by Joss Whedon: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” http://mlkshk.com/p/8TNP You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty. Sacha Guitry (1885 - 1957) I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them. E. V. Lucas “If every trace of every single religion were wiped out and nothing were passsed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.” -Penn Jillette, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales

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Quotes for the new year

Here is another batch of quotes that I have collected over the past couple of months. Hundreds more of my favorite quotes can be found here. I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.' That's just a long-winded religious way to say, 'Shut up.' Penn Jillette, NPR interview Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. Pancho Villa (1877 - 1923), last words “No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.” -Chuck Palahniuk Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, and went bang in the noonday sun. Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the groud, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.” Poster “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ― Albert Einstein "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), "The Crack-Up" (1936) "Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." T-shirt "The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him." Russell Baker (1925 - ) “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ‎"When I feed the poor, I am called a saint... when I ask why the poor are hungry, I am called a Communist!" Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara (Liberation Theologian RC priest, Brazil 1909-1990) "It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." David Brin (1950 - ) "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them." Joseph Heller (1923 - 1999), "Catch-22" “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Christopher Hitchens. "Conceit is God's gift to little men." Bruce Barton "If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room." Anon "You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger." Buddha "We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." Patrick Henry

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