Great minds on war...

[greypilgrim]

I was reading my most cherished book the other day, World War Two Super Facts, and I brought this little snippet in here for yall. Only for fun of course!

The first quote gives me strength no matter what...

enjoy!

There is no substitute for victory.
-General Douglas MacArthur

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
-Albert Einstein

War is delightful to those who have had no experience in it.
-Desiderius Erasmus

Worse than war is the fear of war.
-Seneca (the younger)

My first wish is to see this plauge of mankind, war, banished from the earth.
-George Washington

O war thou son of Hell!
-William Shakespeare

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
-George Washington

There was never a good war or a bad peace.
-Benjamin Franklin

In the absence of leadership, find something and kill it.
-Erwin Rommel

War is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.
-Thomas Jefferson

That mad game the world so loves to play.
-Jonathan Swift

I am insulted by the persistent assertation that I want war. Am I a fool? War! It would settle nothing.
-Adolf Hitler (Nov. 10th, 1933)

[Rangerdave]

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler

Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace.It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him.
King Baudouin I

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
General Omar Bradley

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
Pablo Casals

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Winston Churchill

No one is so foolish as to prefer to peace, war, in which, instead of sons burying their fathers, fathers bury their sons.
Croesus

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 are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
Indira Gandhi

Fondly do we hope, ferverently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Abraham Lincoln

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
Robert Lynd

The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.
Douglas MacArthur

Jaw-jaw is better than war-war
Harold MacMillian

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Friedrich Nietzche

You can no more win a war than win an earthquake.
Jeanette Rankin

War does not determine who is right - only who is left
Bertrand Russell

A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.
Johann Christoph Schiller

It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire when you live next door.
Publius Syrus

The arms race can kill, though the weapons themselves may never be used...by their cost alone, armaments kill the poor by causing them to starve.
Vatican statement to the U.N., 1976

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
H.G. Wells

[Inderjit S]

Indira Gandhi a great mind? Well, I suppose if Hitler is on the list then she belongs there with him.

[Gothmog]

Why do you question the inclusion of Indira Gandhi and not each of the others?

[Inderjit S]

Apart from Hitler, Gandhi is one the only other morally ambiguous people on that list.

Gandhi was an insult to a supposedly secular, democratic and liberal Indian government. She introduced a emergency law (kind of like the Article 48 of the Weimar Republic's constitution and Article 87 of the fundamental laws of Tsarist Russia, which shows how stupid any such move was in a supposed "democracy", Germany's constitution being heavily influenced by the general's and other powerful aristocrats and Russia's pseudo-constitution being drafted by Witte when the Tsar’s position was precarious) after a group of Indian politicians campaigned against her for corrupt campaign practices (kind of like the situation in Britain prior the introduction to the Illegal and Corrupt Practices reform act, in which corrupt election practices were rife, though of course the Corrupt and Illegal practices reform act did not eradicate the electoral corruption) and a high court decision voted to unseat Gandhi from the presidency and ban her from campaigning for the presidency for six years. She decided to reject the judgement, and signed an emergency proclamation, she suspended the constitution, arrested 100,000 political opponents, students etc, introduced a Kafkaesque judicial system, introduced stringent censorship laws and mercilessly dealt with any opposition to her despotic actions and suspended any form of democracy for two years. She was voted out of her seat two years later, but came back into power in 1980.

She then attacked the Sikh's holy shrine; the Golden Temple in Amritsar, to capture a group of Sikh's who were on the run from her. 5,000 civilians were killed, the Sikh temple was bombarded, and our holy scriptures urinated upon.

There are of course other people on the lists who have committed acts which can be seen as being morally ambiguous, such as say Winston Churchill, who claimed that the gassing of Iraqi civilians in the 1920's was morally positive, but Gandhi (and Hitler) take moral ambiguity to another level, they were despots.

[Gothmog]

This is an understandable view on Indira Gandhi but I do not understand why you questioned only her and not Hitler, to cite just one. You only commented that if he were there, why not?

And it seems that in the context of this thread "Great Minds" refers to statements worthy of quoting rather than moral greatness.

[Inderjit S]

Moral greatness often is a factor in "great minds". Can you really call the man who wished for the extermination of a race and the enslavement of another "great"? Maybe, Hitler was after all, a pretty clever guy, he sure as hell sorted out the Nazi party after he was released from jail, and he did sort out Germany after he came to power (though of course it could be argued that Germany's economic recovery was going to happen at one time anyway and a lot of Hitler's quick fix solutions were a result of him, or his advisors reading Keynes and dumping people into the army, though that would be a simplistic assertion. Personally, although I respect some of Hitler’s and even Gandhi’s achievement, some of their actions and ideologies severely retard any respect of them, I understand they were not wholly evil, nobody ever is, but their actions, IMO, belittle their claims to greatness.

I am sure there a lot of other great people who could be quoted too, Thomas Mann, Wilfred Owen, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jeans-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, J.S Mill, Niccolo Machiavelli, Aurelius, Plato, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, Clausewitz, J.R.R Tolkien and George Orwell to name a few.

The reason as to why I quoted her was because 1. not many people know about her, in comparison to Hitler she is pretty esoteric, and everybody knows about Hitler and 2. Because she caught my eye,

[Gothmog]

The reason as to why I quoted her was because 1. not many people know about her, in comparison to Hitler she is pretty esoteric, and everybody knows about Hitler and 2. Because she caught my eye,
Fair enough. I now understand. :) thanks for the answer.

I also agree with the rest of the post. :)

[Barliman Butterbur]

Quotes for the ages;)

"We are none of us infallible—not even the youngest of us." —W. H. Thompson

"We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood." —William James

"It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars." —Garrison Keillor

"Hell hath no fury like the lawyer of a woman scorned." —Henny Youngman

"The hard part about being a bartender is figuring out who is drunk and who is just stupid." —Richard Braunstein

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed." —Sean
O'Casey

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What you are thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life isn't about the chances you're GIVEN — it's about the chances you TAKE". —Stan Forriner

"If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another." —Epicurus

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." —Voltaire

"...Jesse Helms: one of the finest minds of the 12th century..." —Paul Begala, CNN Crossfire

"Beware charm: The indispensable tool of rogues, villains and mountebanks." —Stan Forriner

"Purity of intent, I think, is at the heart of any honest endeavor, including making a work of art of oneself. That, to me, is the ultimate purpose of life." —Stan Forriner

"No other purpose should be attached to truth than that you should know what is true." —Yiddish saying

"Always keep water in your teapot." —Stan Forriner

"The people—that great beast!" —Alexander Hamilton

"Even bad news can be softened by gentle delivery." —BluesMa

"Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room." —Winston Churchill

"The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract." —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Profanity saves a gentleman from a nervous breakdown." —Henny Youngman

"You can only predict things after they happen." —Eugene Ionesco

"One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer." —Stephen Hawking

"It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope." —Pope John XXIII

"We will either learn to act with each other in loving cooperation and appreciation of differences, or we will perish—period." —Stan Forriner

"Watch your attitude. It's the first thing people notice about you." —H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." —John Wooden

"There is no heaven like mutual love." —Granville

"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to
sleep after." —Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"If your feet smell and your nose runs, you're upside down." —L. Prior

"Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions." —Oliver Wendell Holmes

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of
discussion." —Plato

"To attract men, I wear a perfume called 'New Car Interior.'" —Rita Rudner

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned." —Buddha

"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are only consequences." —Robert B. Ingersoll

"In middle age, weightlifting consists of standing up." —Henny Youngman

"A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company." —Charles Evans Hughes

Barley

[joxy]

Inderjit S(ingh?), are you sure that:
1. you are really not yet eighteen years old, and
2. you are not really two completely different people, the one who knows and largely(!) understands so much about almost every subject imaginable, and the one who likes football to the desperate point of thinking it's "beautiful"?
I mean that, up to the football of course, as a major compliment, not the reverse.

[Inderjit S]

Inderjit S(ingh?), are you sure that:

Inderjit Singh Sanghera. Inderjit S (anghera).

you are really not yet eighteen years old, and

I am pretty sure, though my sister keeps telling me I was adopted from a Bangladeshi couple.

you are really not yet eighteen years old, and

Maybe, I'm just a total pedant. :o ;)

football to the desperate point of thinking it's "beautiful

Oh football IS beautiful, though I don't play beautiful football.

[greypilgrim]

Thank you RD and Barliman !!! Those were some very insightful quotes! :)

[Gandalf White]

"In middle age, weightlifting consists of standing up." —Henny Youngman

*falls off his chair laughing* :D

[greypilgrim]

This quote is soooo awesome! I just can't remember who said it - it was said by a General during the American Civil War;

they asked him..."Are you ready to lay down your flag?"
and he said..."This war hasn't yet begun."

I love that quote! :) Please continue posting!!!

[greypilgrim]

I am sure there a lot of other great people who could be quoted too, Thomas Mann, Wilfred Owen, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jeans-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, J.S Mill, Niccolo Machiavelli, Aurelius, Plato, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, Clausewitz, J.R.R Tolkien and George Orwell to name a few.

MLK: "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."

What had Tolkien to say about War? I'd like to know...

[greypilgrim]

Here's another goodie:

And so Rommel explained to the Furher how the Italians were so vital to the war effort:
"They are surrendering in such large numbers that they are bogging down the allies!"

[Éomond]

"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
--Plato


remember that when you go to your next war protest. ;)

[greypilgrim]

Haven't been to one of those in years...
(when I did is was a "pro-war" type of protest, and I was all by myself. ;))