Defence Motivational Quotes

Sometimes people put walls up to see who is strong enough to break them down!

And I know when you’re a teenager everybody feels different and alien to the other people around them but there seems to be an added dimension when you’re queer. It’s because for that period of time you’re more isolated than anybody else and you truly think you are the only one of your kind. So you create fantastic barriers and defence strategies for yourself to survive. And when you get older and realise that you can take them down it’s an internal and eternal struggle to do so. Fear is the best anti-motivator in the world.

Strength lies not in defence but in attack.

Uniform of a soldier and uniform of a student both are equally needed for the nation.

Humility is the only defence against vanity

Civilians enjoy their time because soldiers sacrifice their time.

Self-defense was an accepted motive for murder.

I don't care who you are when it comes to self defence.

When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimised, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbours, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we're acting in self-defence. Evil, menace, those are always the preserve of the other.

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

When an angry mob demands the death of a female English schoolteacher alleged to have insulted the Prophet, as happened in Sudan in November 2007, the real objective was not the defence of Islam but of honour, which – it was felt – had been slighted for many long years by the Western powers. This ‘spontaneous’ use of religion was accompanied by its deliberate instrumentalization by those who are pursuing other objectives, but who prefer this disguise. Even the Crusades, as I have said, had several motives other than religious ones, but these motives were merely less easy to admit to; so they preferred to declare that Jerusalem needed to be liberated. Such a cause appears nobler; and, in addition, the appeal to cultural identity allows more powerful inner resources to be mobilized.

in the following two centuries a common argument in defence of democracy explained that giving citizens political rights is good, because the soldiers and workers of democratic countries perform better than those of dictatorships. Allegedly, granting political rights to people increases their motivation and their initiative, which is useful both on the battlefield and in the factory.

In all these situations of conflict the ego is seeking to repudiate a part of its own id. Thus the institution which sets up the defence and the invading force which is warded off are always the same; the variable factors are the motives which impel the ego to resort to defensive measures. Ultimately all such measures are designed to secure the ego and to save it from experiencing ‘pain.

And can there be anything better for the interests of the State than that the men and women of a State should be as good as possible? There can be nothing better. And this is what the arts of music and gymnastic, when present in such manner as we have described, will accomplish? Certainly. Then we have made an enactment not only possible but in the highest degree beneficial to the State? True. Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same. And as for the man who laughs at naked women exercising their bodies from the best of motives, in his laughter he is plucking 'A fruit of unripe wisdom,' and he himself is ignorant of what he is laughing at, or what he is about;—for that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, That the useful is the noble and the hurtful is the base. Very

The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns.” Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it and moved through it. Thus, Elliot demonstrates, “It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches.” What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. “The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman,” Siegfried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. “What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.”378 Men on every front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fostered malingering.

Gratitude makes the world a softer, kinder place. It softens that brittle shell of defence. There is always something to be grateful for, no matter how small or simple.

To my knowledge, the best summation of this ideology appears in D. R. Goyal’s authoritative history of the RSS. In Goyal’s rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows: Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc.; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.29

​If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence,—rights which are absolutely repugnant to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, that no man should be judge in his own cause. By this each person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for himself, and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of self-defence, the first law of Nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.

First thing, I felt so much of love and compassion when I decided to operate without any defence mechanism. When someone is absolutely feeling secure, he becomes the safest person to live around. He gives security to everyone because he understands the value of being secure!

You must, therefore, know your limits of self-defence; so as not to cross the line of mercy and forgiveness.

To kill required little more than the ability to point and shoot. Almost anyone could do it. To escape required the successful diversion of blame. As a professional assassin, Victor’s motive for killing was either money or self-defence, the latter always related to the pursuit of the former. He killed who he was paid to, and who he had to. Because he had little-to-no connection with his victims he could sidestep almost all of the blame. That was focused at his clients – those who had the most to gain from application of Victor’s talents

Many of the atrocities that have taken place over the last few thousand years have been the result of ‘new brain/mind’ competencies linking up with ‘old brain/mind’ motives and defences. We can even use our ‘new brain/mind’ competencies to justify our actions and give us very sophisticated ways of acting them out. Animals will defend their groups and territories at all times, but only humans can think about how to do it more effectively with guns, or sadistically by torturing those who are either not in the group or who have betrayed it. At least a third of all the world’s research money is spent on weaponry. Rich nations sell poor nations armaments, crippling their economies, maintaining tyrants and causing untold harm, with the profits from the arms sales flowing back to the rich nations. It is, of course, disastrous, but is the consequence of a fantastic ‘new brain/mind’ not being able to sort out the tribal motives of the ‘old brain/mind’ – greed and a belief in the importance of aggressive power. Even religions can feed into this tragedy.

Returning briefly to my novel and my sense that Jonathan might not survive its ending, I'm reminded of some thoughts I had regarding Howard's masterly story "Dagon". At the story's end we find its by-now crazed narrator cowering in his rented San Francisco room and planning an impending suicide that will deliver him from the appalling world of madness and delusion into which his maritime experience has plunged him. On first reading, I perhaps thought this a touch over-dramatic and sensational, although upon turning it over in my mind I realise that it's a wonderful counter-example of the problems I have previously noted in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Whereas in Stoker's book the final affirmation of conventionality and human values tends to undermine the very horror Stoker has so masterfully achieved in the preceding pages, Lovecraft's tale shows a reaction to the supernatural or super-normal (something which is by its very nature utterly incomprehensible) that is a lot more credible in terms of our human psychology: when faced with something which we know should not exist and for which we have neither name nor concept, we do not concoct an ingenious opposing strategy nor rally our defences. Rather, we go mad and kill ourselves. Although this is a bleak and pessimistic ending to a tale, it seems to me that in the realm of alien literary horrors that we are discussing, it is a far more believable and honest one. I somehow don't believe that the adventure mode of storytelling with its reassuring strictures and conventions (fearless heroes ultimately triumphing against some poorly-motivated adversary or other unlikely hazard) is appropriate to the variety of strange tale that I wish to tell.

Adam Smith reduces the process of the formation of capital in the nation to the operation of a private rentier, whose income is determined by the value of his material capital, and who can only increase his income by savings which he again turns into capital. He does not consider that this theory of savings, which in the merchant’s office is quite correct, if followed by a whole nation must lead to poverty, barbarism, powerlessness, and decay of national progress. Where everyone saves and economises as much as he possibly can, no motive can exist for production. Where everyone merely takes thought for the accumulation of values of exchange, the mental power required for production vanishes. A nation consisting of such insane misers would give up the defence of the nation from fear of the expenses of war, and would only learn the truth after all its property had been sacrificed to foreign extortion, that the wealth of nations is to be attained in a manner different to that of the private rentier.

But that’s the thing when you grow up feeling different to everyone else. And I know when you’re a teenager everybody feels different and alien to the other people around them, but there seems to be an added dimension when you’re queer. It’s because for that period of time you’re more isolated than anybody else, and you truly think you are the only one of your kind so you create fantastic barriers and defence strategies for yourself to survive. And when you get older and realise that you can take them down, it’s an internal and eternal struggle to do so. Fear is the best de-motivator in the world.

About a year after my arrival in the Gambia, I was sitting at a bar with a young, wide-eyed intern who stared at me while I told stories about how my friends and I ended up in a tribal court upcountry. When I finished, she paused for a breath and said, “Wow, I hope I have an adventure like that while I’m here.” “Oh, that’s easy. Just do something stupid.” I guess that’s the essence of it: do something stupid. Don’t all adventures or at least interesting stories start that way? They sure don’t start due to the motive power of “good clean living.” Carrying the Ring into Mordor wasn’t calculated to increase Frodo’s “health and wellness.” Heroes of the stage and screen have higher causes — or at least coercion — forcing them to do asinine things: love, blackmail, God and country, whatever. There’s always some cause, some purpose or power that allows us, the viewers, to forgive the hero for making what’s really just a jackass move. I had no lofty reason, no higher cause. My only defence for agreeing in three seconds to quit my job, strap myself to an airplane and hurtle myself across the Atlantic to a country I’d never heard of, for an organization I hardly knew of, comes down to the fact that I was tired and feeling a bit daffy.

There is nothing so skilful in its own defence as imperious pride. It has an ingenious system of its own, of reprisals, -- a system so ingenious that the defeat must be sore indeed, after which it cannot still find some booty to bring off! And even greater than this ingenuity at reprisals is its capacity for self-deception. In this regard, it outdoes vanity a thousandfold. Wounded vanity knows when it is mortally hurt; and limps off the field, piteous, all disguises thrown away...Such pride as this has led many a forlorn hope, on the earth, when all other motives have died out of men's breasts; has won many a crown, which has not been called by its true name.

I’m not a prostitute and I’ll thank you not to treat me like one.” You’ve sold yourself. You may not see yourself as one, but clearly…” his eyes travelled down my body again. I shook my head. I couldn’t understand his motivation for provoking me like this. As beautiful as he was, each time that he opened his mouth I was finding it harder and harder to picture myself in bed with him. “One night in my life and a bit of broken skin does not constitute prostitution.” His dark gaze intensified, as if with one long, determined gaze he could break through my defences. I drew back. “Sex for money is prostitution.” I shrugged, determined not to let him see that he was getting under my skin. “I prefer not to put a label on it. One night of my life does not define me.