Glass
David MitchellTags: peace pacifism fragile provocative-inspirational
The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass.
Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.
Tags: war economics military pacifism defense
Magistrate: What do you propose to do then, pray?
Lysistrata: You ask me that! Why, we propose to administer the treasury ourselves
Magistrate: You do?
Lysistrata: What is there in that a surprise to you? Do we not administer the budget of household expenses?
Magistrate: But that is not the same thing.
Lysistrata: How so – not the same thing?
Magistrate: It is the treasury supplies the expenses of the War.
Lysistrata: That's our first principle – no War!
Tags: war feminism drama pacifism greek-literature
Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!
Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business.
Tags: war feminism drama pacifism gender-roles greek-literature
The young officers who had come back [from WW1], hardened by their terrible experience and disgusted by the attitude of the younger generation to whom this experience meant just nothing, used to lecture us for our softness. Of course they could produce no argument that we were capable of understanding. They could only bark at you that war was ‘a good thing’, it ‘made you tough’, ‘kept you fit’, etc. etc. We merely sniggered at them. Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies.
George OrwellTags: pacifism world-war-i
It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.
John FowlesTags: humanity violence cruelty pacifism
But you invite ...”
“I invite a bit of military nonsense.”
“That’s what I ...”
“Duncan, I am a teacher. Remember that. By repetition, I impress the lesson.”
“What lesson?”
“The ultimately suicidal nature of military foolishness.
Tags: pacifism militarism
War is just a damn nuisance.
Mark HannaIt is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?
George Orwell[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans," wrote the Mahatma. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." He went on to say: "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." I must say that everything in me declines to be addressed in that tone of voice
Christopher Hitchens« first previous
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