thedrifter
01-07-03, 07:48 AM
Quotations............
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
- John Stuart Mill, "The Contest in America," pp. 208-09, in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1867). Written just prior to the U.S. Civil War to oppose Great Britain's favour of the Confederate side.
it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.
- The Funeral Oration of Pericles (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War)
That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members.
- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and in the long run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: "Come back with your shield or on it." Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.
- Robert Heinlein
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke
Canada is an unmilitary community. Warlike her people have often been forced to be; military they never have been.
- C.P. Stacey, 1955
A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
. . judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour, never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the miserable that would most justly be unsparing of their lives; these have nothing to hope for: it is rather they to whom continued life may bring reverses as yet unknown, and to whom a fall, if it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences.
- The Funeral Oration of Pericles (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War)
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?
- Horatius at the Bridge, Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babbington Macaulay
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
(It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one's country.)
- Horace, Odes, III
If a man hasn't discovered something that he would die for, he isn't fit to live.
- Martin Luther King, 23 Jun 1963
Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own.
- Wm. Shakespeare, Henry V
Peace purchased at the cost of any part of our national integrity is fit only for slaves, and even when purchased for such a price it is a delusion, for it cannot last.
- Wm. E. Borah
War is the second worst activity of mankind, the worst being acquiescence in slavery.
- Wm. F. Buckley Jr.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
- George Orwell
Bella suscipienda sunt ob eum causum, ut sine injuria in pace vivatur.
(Wars are to be undertaken in order that it may be possible to live in peace without molestation.)
- Cicero
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
- Dolores Ibarruri, speaking against Generalissimo Franco's Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, 3 Sep 1936
A pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.
- Theodore Roosevelt, July 27 1917
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. . . . Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.
- Benjamin Franklin
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
- Patrick Henry, Mar 23 1775
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
- Thos. Jefferson
Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
- Jean Paul Sartre
Shall your brethren go to war, and shall ye sit here?
- Numbers 32:6
Why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience?
- 1 Corinthians 10:29
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
- John 8:32
The vast majority of citizens, as well as most of their civil servants and cabinet ministers do not believe that their own armies are relevant to their lives or to the life of their society. Their neither feel responsible for the armies their taxes support nor do they hate them. Most people are simply indifferent.
But no civilization can afford to turn its back on the mechanisms of violence. . . . The refusal to address the question of force because we do not wish to use it merely leaves us naked before those who may wish to use it against us.
- John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
- Thomas Sowell
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our nation is turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
- Excerpt of Speech given by Sir Winston Churchill to the House of Commons as the The Battle of Britain Begins, 18 June 1940
At the Day of Judgment, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done.
- Thomas a Kempis
My path is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.
- Francis Schaeffer, 1984
August 5, 1916
Dear Mrs. Meloney,
There are a good many things that America needs, if Santa Claus could only give them!
Here are a few of them:
1. That every molly-coddle, professional pacifist, and man who is "too proud to fight" when the nation's quarrel is just, should be exiled to those out of the way parts... where the spirit of manliness has not yet penetrated.
2. That every decent young man should have a family, job, and the military training which will enable him to keep this country out of war by making it dangerous for any ruthless military people to attack us.
3. That every youngster should have a good and wise mother; and every good woman a child for her arms.
4. That we may all of us become an efficient, patriotic, and nobly proud people - too proud either to inflict wrong or to endure it.
Good luck, Always yours
Theodore Roosevelt
Brutus: Who is here so vile that will not love his country?
-Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.
- Abraham Lincoln
continued............
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
- John Stuart Mill, "The Contest in America," pp. 208-09, in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1867). Written just prior to the U.S. Civil War to oppose Great Britain's favour of the Confederate side.
it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.
- The Funeral Oration of Pericles (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War)
That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members.
- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and in the long run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: "Come back with your shield or on it." Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.
- Robert Heinlein
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke
Canada is an unmilitary community. Warlike her people have often been forced to be; military they never have been.
- C.P. Stacey, 1955
A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
. . judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour, never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the miserable that would most justly be unsparing of their lives; these have nothing to hope for: it is rather they to whom continued life may bring reverses as yet unknown, and to whom a fall, if it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences.
- The Funeral Oration of Pericles (Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War)
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?
- Horatius at the Bridge, Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babbington Macaulay
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
(It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one's country.)
- Horace, Odes, III
If a man hasn't discovered something that he would die for, he isn't fit to live.
- Martin Luther King, 23 Jun 1963
Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own.
- Wm. Shakespeare, Henry V
Peace purchased at the cost of any part of our national integrity is fit only for slaves, and even when purchased for such a price it is a delusion, for it cannot last.
- Wm. E. Borah
War is the second worst activity of mankind, the worst being acquiescence in slavery.
- Wm. F. Buckley Jr.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
- George Orwell
Bella suscipienda sunt ob eum causum, ut sine injuria in pace vivatur.
(Wars are to be undertaken in order that it may be possible to live in peace without molestation.)
- Cicero
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
- Dolores Ibarruri, speaking against Generalissimo Franco's Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, 3 Sep 1936
A pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.
- Theodore Roosevelt, July 27 1917
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. . . . Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.
- Benjamin Franklin
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
- Patrick Henry, Mar 23 1775
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
- Thos. Jefferson
Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
- Jean Paul Sartre
Shall your brethren go to war, and shall ye sit here?
- Numbers 32:6
Why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience?
- 1 Corinthians 10:29
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
- John 8:32
The vast majority of citizens, as well as most of their civil servants and cabinet ministers do not believe that their own armies are relevant to their lives or to the life of their society. Their neither feel responsible for the armies their taxes support nor do they hate them. Most people are simply indifferent.
But no civilization can afford to turn its back on the mechanisms of violence. . . . The refusal to address the question of force because we do not wish to use it merely leaves us naked before those who may wish to use it against us.
- John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards
If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
- Thomas Sowell
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our nation is turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
- Excerpt of Speech given by Sir Winston Churchill to the House of Commons as the The Battle of Britain Begins, 18 June 1940
At the Day of Judgment, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done.
- Thomas a Kempis
My path is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.
- Francis Schaeffer, 1984
August 5, 1916
Dear Mrs. Meloney,
There are a good many things that America needs, if Santa Claus could only give them!
Here are a few of them:
1. That every molly-coddle, professional pacifist, and man who is "too proud to fight" when the nation's quarrel is just, should be exiled to those out of the way parts... where the spirit of manliness has not yet penetrated.
2. That every decent young man should have a family, job, and the military training which will enable him to keep this country out of war by making it dangerous for any ruthless military people to attack us.
3. That every youngster should have a good and wise mother; and every good woman a child for her arms.
4. That we may all of us become an efficient, patriotic, and nobly proud people - too proud either to inflict wrong or to endure it.
Good luck, Always yours
Theodore Roosevelt
Brutus: Who is here so vile that will not love his country?
-Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.
- Abraham Lincoln
continued............