Warfare Quotes

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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Graham Greene (The Third Man)
Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Stephen King (The Stand)
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Warren Buffett
Always remember... Rumors are carried by haters, spread by fools, and accepted by idiots.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
She tried to get even with him through psychological warfare but couldn't, because he didn't care.
Steve Martin (Shopgirl)
Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
Wendell Berry
Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
I have seen so many people try everything—prayer, fasting, accountability—yet still struggle. And then, in one moment of encountering the power of God, they are set free forever.
Kathryn Krick (Unlock Your Deliverance: Keys to Freedom From Demonic Oppression)
What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question.
Michael Crichton (The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2))
Trust is earned, respect is given, and loyalty is demonstrated. Betrayal of any one of those is to lose all three.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare.
Martha Wells (Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4))
            It was stated by an Australian Army Officer, “Phuoc Tuy offers the perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare. It has a long coastline with complex areas of mangrove swamps, isolated ranges of very rugged mountains and a large area of uninhabited jungle containing all of the most loathsome combinations of thorny bamboos, poisonous snakes, insects, malaria, dense underbrush, swamps and rugged ground conditions that the most dedicated guerrilla warfare expert could ask for.
Michael G. Kramer (A Gracious Enemy)
In conclusion, the arms of others either fall from your back, or they weigh you down, or they bind you fast.
Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)
It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee
This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.
R.F. Kuang (The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War, #2))
Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
Success in warfare is gained by carefully accommodating ourselves to the enemy's purpose.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
Life is a warfare against the malice of others.
Baltasar Gracián
A true Christian is one who has not only peace of conscience, but war within. He may be known by his warfare as well as by his peace.
J.C. Ryle (Holiness)
Silena appeared out of the woods, her sword drawn. Her Aphrodite armour was pink and red, colour coordinated to match her clothes and makeup. She looked like Guerilla Warfare Barbie.
Rick Riordan (The Demigod Files (Percy Jackson and the Olympians))
Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth." "What giants?" Asked Sancho Panza. "The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long." "Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone." "Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison
Life is like a camera. Focus on what's important. Capture the good times. And if things don't work out, just take another shot.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
John Smith: Mankind doesn't need warfare and bloodshed to prove itself. Everyday life can provide honour and valour. Let's hope that from now on this country can find its heroes in smaller places. In the most ordinary of deeds.
Paul Cornell
One of the hardest decisions you'll ever face in life is choosing whether to walk away or try harder.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Don't promise when you're happy, Don't reply when you're angry, and don't decide when you're sad.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.
Theodore John Kaczynski (Industrial Society and Its Future)
If someone is going out of his way to ignore you, he is not ignoring you, he is obsessed by you.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.
Aberjhani (The River of Winged Dreams)
Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.
Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game (Ender's Saga, #1))
All warfare is based on deception.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
People are not who they say but rather who their actions reveal them to be....Be smart about it. Don't fall for the bullshit.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Although security and warfare had never been my gig, vampire security was highly contextual and thus incredibly interesting. There were links to history (Vampires were screwed over yesterday!) and politics (House X screwed us over yesterday!), philosophy (Why do you think they screwed us over yesterday?) and ethics (If we didn’t bite, would they have screwed us over yesterday?), and, of course, strategy (How did they screw us over? How can we keep them from screwing us over again or, better yet, screw them over first?).
Chloe Neill (Some Girls Bite (Chicagoland Vampires, #1))
Be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you need help, and brave enough to ask for it.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.
Lawrence Durrell (Balthazar (The Alexandria Quartet, #2))
Tiago decided he enjoyed armchair warfare. It was so comfortable, and there were pastries.
Thea Harrison (Storm's Heart (Elder Races, #2))
Guido raised his hand to his head and moved his index finger around in a circle near his temple indicating Smalley Pauley had some mental issues.
A.G. Russo (Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss (O'Shaughnessy Investigations Inc. 2))
As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
Chögyam Trungpa (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility; but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage.
William Shakespeare (Henry V)
Never explain yourself. Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
In 1945, peace broke out. It was the end of the Joke. Joke warfare was banned at a special session of the Geneva Convention, and in 1950 the last remaining copy of the joke was laid to rest here in the Berkshire countryside, never to be told again.
Graham Chapman (Monty Python's Flying Circus)
The skillful tactician may be likened to the shuai-jan. Now the shuai-jan is a snake that is found in the Ch'ang mountains. Strike at its head, and you will be attacked by its tail; strike at its tail, and you will be attacked by its head; strike at its middle, and you will be attacked by head and tail both.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
Remember, sometimes diplomacy is the better side of warfare." "Dipolomacy is a lot easier to accomplish if you've got your foe on his knees hoping you don't lop off his head.
C.J. Redwine (Defiance (Defiance, #1))
In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)
Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
Chögyam Trungpa (Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism)
I don't know how people can fake whole relationships... I can't even fake a hello to somebody I don't like
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Funny how some things work out. I mean, how many pairs of eyes do you look into in a lifetime – hundreds, maybe even thousands? Yet, only one pair of eyes means anything and everything. Who knows why?
A.G. Russo (Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss (O'Shaughnessy Investigations Inc. 2))
In war, the first casualty is truth.
Terry Hayes (I Am Pilgrim)
In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children...The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.
Thomas L. Friedman
If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch, #2))
Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful idiots are always asking, "What's in it for me"?
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Your body wages biological warfare on me.
Helen Hoang (The Kiss Quotient (The Kiss Quotient, #1))
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
There will be hatred. There will be war. The country will fight itself to pieces. It will starve its people, ravage its land, poison its breath. Shanghai will fall and break and cry. But alongside everything, there has to be love - eternal, undying, enduring. Burn through vengeance and terror and warfare. Burn through everything that fuels the human heart and Sears it red, burn through everything that covers the outside with hard muscle and tough sinew. Cut down deep and grab what beats beneath, and it is love that will survive after everything else has perished.
Chloe Gong (Our Violent Ends (These Violent Delights, #2))
We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.
Jean Vanier (Community and Growth)
Physical training is mental warfare!
Tae Yun Kim (Seven Steps to Inner Power)
Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.
Margaret Mead
Be careful who you trust, the devil was once an angel.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow. The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately: I have received yours,—but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,—it is all that remains for either of us." And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real. Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
Stay! Take the drink. Take my hand. Marry me.
Andri E. Elia (Yildun: Worldmaker of Yand)
If my God damns people for love but saves them for brutle warfare, then that is not the God I know or wish to worship.
Kent Marrero
...life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion.
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
Before you step into the realm of the spirit through spiritual warfare, and against any demonic attack against you, there is something you must do: You must establish a foundation in Christ.
John Ramirez (Conquer Your Deliverance: How to Live a Life of Total Freedom)
When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.
Robert B. Reich
Don't trust people whose feelings change with time... Trust people whose feelings remain the same, even when the time changes.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
The nature of the enemy's warfare in your life is to cause you to become discouraged and to cast away your confidence. Not that you would necessarily discard your salvation, but you could give up your hope of God's deliverance. The enemy wants to numb you into a coping kind of Christianity that has given up hope of seeing God's resurrection power.
Bob Sorge (Glory: When Heaven Invades Earth)
Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow, Serenaded by a stray bird or two. Kings and commoners end up the same, No more enduring than last night's dream.
Ryōkan
If you can’t control it, fly with it.
Andri E. Elia (Yildun: Worldmaker of Yand)
We lack spiritual-warfare tactics and spiritual-warfare training, and we also lack understanding of the arsenals of heaven because we do not have the faith to confront the devil.
John Ramirez (Conquer Your Deliverance: How to Live a Life of Total Freedom)
Everyone's life is a warfare, and that long and various.
Epictetus
Spiritual warfare is very real. There is a furious, fierce, and ferocious battle raging in the realm of the spirit between the forces of God and the forces of evil. Warfare happens every day, all the time. Whether you believe it or not, you are in a battlefield. You are in warfare.
Pedro Okoro
I'm strong because I know my weaknesses. I'm wise because I've been foolish. I laugh because I've known sadness.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Ah. So he's forgotten the most important rule of warfare. Which is... That nothing ever goes to plan.
Scott Westerfeld (Goliath (Leviathan, #3))
Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.
David Grann (The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon)
Oh, dear me." Nathalie sank back down in the chair and examined her Uggs. "The sarcasm could've started dripping off her and stained the floor. "Is it conspiracy, treachery, murder, or open warfare? I'll have to choose my lipstick accordingly.
Lilith Saintcrow (Defiance (Strange Angels, #4))
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last
George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia)
We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians'; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated.
T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King)
Seek respect, not attention. It lasts longer.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Anisette! You will eat your food, not demonstrate aerial warfare across the table with it.
T.A. Miles (Raventide)
If someone can change your mind, he has won you over without raising his hand against you. This is the future of warfare.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knos waht warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure youo didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's waht you were born for.
Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game (Ender's Saga, #1))
To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.
John Green (Paper Towns)
As you grow older, you realize it becomes less important to have more friends and more important to have real ones. People nowadays don't know the true meaning of friendship and loyalty. People always suddenly miss you more once they see how much happier you are without them. Learn the real from the fake....and don't worry about the mistakes you make. There are no mistakes in life, just lessons. The only people worthy to be in your life are the ones that help you through the hard times and laugh with you after the hard times pass.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Kill your enemies with success and bury them with a smile.... Never fails.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
Howard Zinn
Father Jakob mentioned to her that military men took it personally when women at home were assaulted. They were away fighting for their country and they believed the men left behind had an obligation to take care of and protect the women on the homefront. Maeve knew from experience women mostly had to take care of themselves.
A.G. Russo (Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss (O'Shaughnessy Investigations Inc. 2))
I want to burden the conscience of the affluent with all the suffering and all the hidden, bitter tears.
Rosa Luxemburg
The perfect fascist state needs to operate in conditions of perpetual warfare. Have you ever noticed how the world has been in constant crisis since World War II?
Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Vol. 6: Kissing Mister Quimper)
In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.
Kathy Acker
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
Frans de Waal (Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are)
He who has conquered his own coward spirit has conquered the whole outward world;
Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown's Schooldays (Tom Brown, #1))
Men may spurn our appeals, reject our message, oppose our arguments, despise our persons, but they are helpless against our prayers.
J. Sidlow Baxter
Class warfare or soaking the so-called rich may make for good populist demagoguery and serve the political ends of the governing masterminds, but it does nothing to solve the grave realities of the federal government's insatiable appetite for spending and its inability to reform itself.
Mark R. Levin (The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic)
Radically ordinary hospitality does not simply flow from the day-to-day interests of the household. You must prepare spiritually. The Bible calls spiritual preparation warfare. Radically ordinary hospitality is indeed spiritual warfare.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World)
Don't get mad, get even,
Robert F. Kennedy
Every man who repeats the dogma of Mill that one country is no fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.
B.R. Ambedkar
Many Christians... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness.
David A. Seamands (Healing for Damaged Emotions (Authentic Classics))
He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
Don't wait for miracles. Your whole life is a miracle. Live it up and dare to leave an impact. There is no rehearsal.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana (N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups)
Don’t be afraid to make people mad. Your honesty will inspire your true followers. I piss off tons of people every day.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Never apologize for having high standards. People who really want to be in your life will rise up to meet them.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison (Letters and other writings of James Madison)
It is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin, and the real issues at stake in the great controversy. His sophistry lessens the obligation of the divine law and gives men license to sin. At the same time he causes them to cherish false conceptions of God so that they regard Him with fear and hate rather than with love. The cruelty inherent in his own character is attributed to the Creator; it is embodied in systems of religion and expressed in modes of worship.
Ellen Gould White (The Great Controversy: Annotated)
Sometimes being too nice is dangerous, you have to show your mean side once in a while to avoid getting hurt.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
If you aren't destroying your enemies, it's because you have been conquered and assimilated, you do not even have an idea of who your enemies are. You have been brainwashed into believing you are your own enemy, and you are set against yourself. The enemy is laughing at you as you tear yourself to pieces. That is the most effective warfare an enemy can launch on his foes: confounding them.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.
Eric Metaxas (Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy)
Remember...Whoever is trying to bring you down is already below you.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
To hell with the rich, they make me sick.
Raymond Chandler
Historical experience is written in iron and blood.
Mao Zedong (On Guerrilla Warfare)
Chase your dreams but always know the road that will lead you home again.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Helen slowly became aware of an unnerving red light. She lifted her head and looked around. The glow bounced off the cold stone walls and intensified quickly. It filled her with thoughts of despair and hopelessness. She tried to shake them off. You have what’s mine! Where is it? I want it! Helen shuddered violently. She recalled the inner voice that urged her to use the stone to keep Prince Harnak from dying. That voice was comforting and encouraging. This voice was oppressive and angry and beat on her relentlessly. “No!” she muttered. “Go away. I have nothing for you or anyone else, not even me.” The red light flickered out. Only the numbing cold and her utter isolation, cheerless companions, remained.
Candace L. Talmadge (Stoneslayer: Book One Scandal)
But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty.
Ron Paul
Every source of blessing is a point of attack.
David McGee
Dreaming is what you do when your eyes are closed...living is what you do with that dream once you open your eyes!
Nate Parks (The Nephelium)
On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth
Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1))
We try to fight the enemy with yesterday’s anointing for today’s battle. Yesterday’s anointing was good for yesterday—and for yesterday’s victory—but when we try to fight the new battles and new spiritual warfare of today, we learn a hard lesson: There are new levels and new devils.
John Ramirez (Conquer Your Deliverance: How to Live a Life of Total Freedom)
Don't spend money on things... spend money on experiences. You'll enjoy life a lot more!
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
There's no need to be perfect to inspire others. Let people get inspired by how you deal with your imperfections.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms.
Thomas Sowell (The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy)
For many years a tree might wage a slow and silent warfare against an encumbering wall, without making any visible progress. One day the wall would topple--not because the tree had suddenly laid hold upon some supernormal energy, but because its patient work of self-defense and self release had reached fulfillment. The long-imprisoned tree had freed itself. Nature had had her way.
Lloyd C. Douglas (The Robe)
It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.
James Connolly
Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society”. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Stephen King (The Stand)
Take God at His Word – because winning the battle doesn't require physical brawn, but spiritual brains!
Pedro Okoro (Crushing the Devil: Your Guide to Spiritual Warfare and Victory In Christ)
I tried to be normal once... worst two minutes of my life.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
The demon's target is not the possessed; it is us the observers..everyone in this house. I think the point is to make us despair..to reject our humanity: to see ourselves as ultimately bestial, vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy.
William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist (The Exorcist, #1))
In the human life time is but an instant, and the substance of it a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of certainty. And, to say all in a word, everything that belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- fame is oblivion. What then can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
Fight your battles through prayer, And win your battles through faith.
Luffina Lourduraj
Because he that lacks knowledge about his enemy will find himself sitting in total defeat where bondage and misery reigns and rules.
John Ramirez (Fire Prayers: Building Arsenals That Destroy Satanic Kingdoms)
The best things in history are accomplished by people who get tired of being shoved around.
Robert A. Heinlein (Have Space Suit—Will Travel)
If you want to fight hell and the power of darkness that seek to destroy the hearts of our daughters, I know a type of spiritual warfare that creates value in a daughter's spirit. It is called "Taking your Daughter out for tea" or "Going to Her Soccer Game", and it works in direct opposition to the agenda of hell and darkness that wants to destroy their lives.
Jim Anderson (Unmasked: Exposing the Cultural Sexual Assualt)
A potential revolutionary situation exists in any country where the government consistently fails in its obligation to ensure at least a minimally decent standard of life for the great majority of its citizens.
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung On Guerrilla Warfare)
It is more important to go slow and gain the lessons you need along the journey then to rush the process and arrive at your destination empty.
Germany Kent
True Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Never judge someone based on what you've heard.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Until you are broken, you don't know what you're made of.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
There's a story behind every person. There's a reason why they're the way they are. Think about that before you judge anyone.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
The powers of darkness, the devil and his army, do not want your God-ordained purpose and destiny to be fulfilled in your life… It is time we pick up the weapons of our warfare and bring them to the devil—instead of just talking about it—if we want to experience the type of victory Jesus already purchased for us through the finished work of the cross.
John Ramirez (Conquer Your Deliverance: How to Live a Life of Total Freedom)
Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being attacked. Women and children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People were being dragged from their homes and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done. And even if you avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? You have already seen what it is capable of doing. It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about--lovers, children--will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will grow lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you and there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. Instead you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death comes and beckons you into his darkness. The life you left behind you is no life at all. Here, you can be king, and I will allow you to age with dignity and without pain, and when the time comes for you to die, I will send you gently to sleep and you will awaken in the paradise of your choosing, for each man dreams his own heaven.
John Connolly (The Book of Lost Things (The Book of Lost Things, #1))
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Wendell Berry
The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists. It rewards people who get things done.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Wherever you encounter domination, you can be sure that it is satanic. That is not how God rules people.
Derek Prince (Pulling Down Strongholds (pocket size): Mighty Weapons for Spiritual Warfare)
What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima. – John Hersey, quoted in Fallout by Lesley Blume
John Hersey
I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water.
Harlan Ellison
I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe.
Terence McKenna (Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge)
To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.
Murray Bookchin
Renunciation is the spiritual scissors or act that cuts things to the root out of your life, in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It’s time to shame the devil and make Jesus Christ proud.
John Ramirez (Fire Prayers: Building Arsenals That Destroy Satanic Kingdoms)
The ministry of violence is a spiritual conflict. It’s a ministry that every child of God cannot afford to sweep under the rug. If they do, they will suffer spiritual loss, and will never be more than conquerors in Christ Jesus.
John Ramirez (Fire Prayers: Building Arsenals That Destroy Satanic Kingdoms)
Faith in God will elevate you to next level blessings.
Germany Kent
There are only 2 paths to happiness in life. Utter Stupidity or Exceptional Wealth.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
You are not fighting for victory—you are fighting from victory. This battle has already been won!
Tony Evans (Victory in Spiritual Warfare: Outfitting Yourself for the Battle)
God expects you to have the mentality of a conqueror. See yourself as a victor in Christ Jesus, and go about life with a holy swagger!
Pedro Okoro (Crushing the Devil: Your Guide to Spiritual Warfare and Victory In Christ)
Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can’t stop seeing it that way. It’s everywhere, everyone. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s not life. It can’t be. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not life.
Jed McKenna (Spiritual Warfare (The Enlightenment Trilogy Book 3))
Why would you want to kidnap Herr Schiller’s grandson?” Jansch looked at his boss. He arched his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t.” “I know you wouldn’t. But amuse me, please.” Jansch studied the car for a moment. “Leverage,” he said eventually.
Michael Parker (The Eagle's Covenant)
If you want to bring the world closer to peace, be a peacemaker by creating peace whenever you can. If you find yourself engaged in an argument that only stirs anger in the heart, quickly make peace and carry on.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Throughout my life, until this very moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including any benefit that may come from this book, I dedicate to the welfare of all beings. May the roots of suffering diminish. May warfare, violence, neglect, indifference, and addiction also decrease. May the wisdom and compassion of all beings increase, now and in the future. May we clearly see all the barriers we erect between ourselves and others to be as insubstantial as our dreams. May we appreciate the great perfection of all phenomena. May we continue to open our hearts and minds, in order to work ceaselessly for the benefit of all beings. May we go to the places that scare us. May we lead the life of a warrior.
Pema Chödrön (The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times)
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.
C.S. Lewis
Ages of happiness. - An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. The destiny of man is designed for happy moments - every life has them - but not for happy ages. Nonetheless they will remain fixed in the imagination of man as 'the other side of the hill' because they have been inherited from ages past: for the concepts of the age of happiness was no doubt acquired in primeval times from that condition of which, after violent exertion in hunting and warfare, man gives himself up to repose, stretches his limbs and hears the pinions of sleep rustling about him. It is a false conclusion if, in accordance with that ancient familiar experience, man imagines that, after whole ages of toil and deprivation, he can then partake of that condition of happiness correspondingly enhanced and protracted.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister, when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall.
Napoléon Bonaparte
When he reached the last hole he saw, far to the west, a series of rockets bloom in the sky. He watched their green and yellow and red petals arch across the horizon, and fade into the gloom of the earth. It was very beautiful, but he recognized them for Chinese rockets.
Pat Frank (Hold Back the Night)
Another scheme of Satan is to eliminate from the church all the humble, self-denying ordinances that are offensive to unsanctified tastes and unregenerate hearts. He seeks to reduce the church to a mere human institution—popular, natural, fleshly, and pleasing.
E.M. Bounds (Guide to Spiritual Warfare)
I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.
Sherman Alexie (Flight)
There's no need for heartbreak warfare. It's called 'I love you' — 'I love you too'. 'I need more love' — 'You got more love', and you can get through life like that. Shouldn't you just on days where you want more love be like 'I had a bad dream that you were sleeping around, it's really irrational, but just love me extra today'. Why can't we just have this thing where you just say 'Just love me extra today'. If I was with somebody and they said 'Love me extra today', I would love them extra forever.
John Mayer
Death is before me today Like a sick man’s recovery, Like going outdoors after confinement. Death is before me today Like the fragrance of myrrh, Like sitting under sail on breeze day. Death is before me today Like the fragrance of lotus. Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness. Death is before me today Like a well-trodden way, Like a man’s coming home from warfare. Death is before me today Like the clearing of the sky. As when a man discovers what he ignored. Death is before me today Like a man’s longing to see his home When he has spent many years in captivity
Miriam Lichtheim (Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms)
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The time of a man's life is as a point; the substance of it ever flowing, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to corruption. His soul is restless, fortune uncertain, and fame doubtful; to be brief, as a stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as a smoke, so are all that belong unto the soul. Our life is a warfare, and a mere pilgrimage. Fame after life is no better than oblivion. What is it then that will adhere and follow? Only one thing, philosophy. And philosophy doth consist in this, for a man to preserve that spirit which is within him, from all manner of contumelies and injuries, and above all pains or pleasures; never to do anything either rashly, or feignedly, or hypocritically: only to depend from himself, and his own proper actions: all things that happen unto him to embrace contentendly, as coming from Him from whom he himself also came; and above all things, with all meekness and a calm cheerfulness, to expect death, as being nothing else but the resolution of those elements, of which every creature is composed. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common unto all, why should it be feared by any? Is not this according to nature? But nothing that is according to nature can be evil.
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells, And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes, Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall, Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.
Wilfred Owen (The War Poems)
How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present
Robert Walser (The Tanners)
These fire prayer points will bring havoc and destruction against the powers of darkness and give you a great victory upon every evil, demonic, satanic monitoring system for the kingdom of the devil himself and the demonic demons will be destroyed and pulverized out of your life once and for all.
John Ramirez (Fire Prayers: Building Arsenals That Destroy Satanic Kingdoms)
People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul. The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015
David Brooks
History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.
Terence McKenna
I chiefly concern myself with those who seldom get a hearing, & I don't feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful. The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs. The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it.
Joe Sacco (Journalism)
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett
I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants. Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
In the book of Alma is a story that has fascinated e since I first read it. it is about a very colorful character named Moroni--not to be confused with the last survivor of the Nephites, who was also named Moroni. This man was a brilliant military commander, and he rose to be supreme commander of all the Nephite forces at the age of twenty-five. For the next fourteen years he was off to the wars continuously except for two very short periods of peace during which he worked feverishly at reinforcing the Nephite defenses. When peace finally came, he was thirty-nine years old, and the story goes that at the age of forty-three he died. Sometime before this he had given the chief command of the armies of the Nephites to his son Moronihah. Now, if he had a son, he had a wife. I've often wondered where she was and how she fared during those fourteen years of almost continuous warfare, and how she felt to have him die so soon after coming home. I am sure there are many, many stories of patience and sacrifice that have never been told. We each do our part, and we each have our story.
Marjorie Pay Hinckley (Small and Simple Things)
The most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission. A more subtle version of this claim argues that their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labor, such as plowing and harvesting. This gives them control of food production, which in turn translates into political clout. There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power. First, the statement that men are stronger is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease, and fatigue than men. There are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men. Furthermore, and most problematically for this theory, women have, throughout history, mainly been excluded from jobs that required little physical effort, such as the priesthood, law, and politics, while engaging in hard manual labor in the fields....and in the household. If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. ...Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. Another theory explains that masculine dominance results not from strength but from aggression. Millions of years of evolution have made men far more violent than women. Women can match men as far as hatred, greed, and abuse are concern, but when push comes to shove…men are more willing to engage in raw physical violence. This is why, throughout history, warfare has been a masculine prerogative. In times of war, men’s control of the armed forces has made them the masters of civilian society too. They then use their control of civilian society to fight more and more wars. …Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are…on average, better suited to serve as common soldiers. Yet, granted that the common soldiers are all men, does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men? That makes no sense. It’s like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton fields are all Black, plantation owners will be Black as well. Just as an all-Black workforce might be controlled by an all-White management, why couldn’t an all-male soldiery be controlled by an all-female government?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
A woman's body is a sacred temple. A work of art, and a life-giving vessel. And once she becomes a mother, her body serves as a medicine cabinet for her infant. From her milk she can nourish and heal her own child from a variety of ailments. And though women come in a wide assortment as vast as the many different types of flowers and birds, she is to reflect divinity in her essence, care and wisdom. God created a woman's heart to be a river of love, not to become a killing machine.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
I am a feminist because I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end to the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestion of sex warfare, the very name feminist. I want to be about the work in which my real interests like, the writing of novels and so forth. But while inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist. And I shan't be happy till I get . . . a society in which there is no distinction of persons either male or female, but a supreme regard for the importance of the human being. And when that dream is a reality, I will say farewell to feminism, as to any disbanded but victorious army, with honour for its heroes, gratitude for its sacrifice, and profound relief that the hour for its necessity has passed.
Winifred Holtby
The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret)
…having once seen him put forth his strength in battle, methinks I could know him again among a thousand warriors. He rushes into the fray as if he were summoned to a banquet. There is more than mere strength--there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the champion were given to every blow which he deals upon his enemies. God assoilzie him of the sin of bloodshed! It is fearful, yet magnificent, to behold how the arm and heart of one man can triumph over hundreds.
Walter Scott (Ivanhoe (Unabriged))
Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. In the real world, that’s not how things work at all. Companies aren’t big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup. Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines – habits – that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done.
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
Civil war... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as 'foreign war'? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers? Wars could only be defined by their aims. There were no 'foreign' or 'civil' wars, only wars that were just or unjust. Until the great universal concord could be arrived at, warfare, at least when it was the battle between the urgent future and the dragging past, might be unavoidable. How could such a war be condemned? War is not shameful, nor the sword-thrust a stab in the back, except when it serves to kill right and progress, reason, civilization, and truth. When this is war's purpose it maeks no difference whether it is civil or foreign war - it is a crime. Outside the sacred cause for justice, what grounds has one kind of war for denigrating another? By what right does the sword of Washington despise the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Which is the greater - Leonidas fighting the foreign enemy or Timoleon slaying the tyrant who was his brother? One was a defender, the other a liberator. Are we to condemn every resort to arms that takes place within the citadel, without concerning ourselves with its aim?
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.
Edward Abbey
He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment's thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.
James Jones (The Thin Red Line)
So it is with sorrow, each thinks his own present grief the most severe. For of this he judges by his own experience. He that is childless considers nothing so sad as to be without children; he that is poor, and has many children, complains of the extreme evils of a large family. He who has but one, looks upon this as the greatest misery, because that one, being set too much store by, and never corrected, becomes willful, and brings grief upon his father. He who has a beautiful wife, thinks nothing so bad as having a beautiful wife, because it is the occasion of jealousy and intrigue. He who has an ugly one, thinks nothing worse than having a plain wife, because it is constantly disagreeable. The private man thinks nothing more mean, more useless, than his mode of life. The soldier declares that nothing is more toilsome, more perilous, than warfare; that it would he better to live on bread and water than endure such hardships. He that is in power thinks there can be no greater burden than to attend to the necessities of others. He that is subject to that power, thinks nothing more servile than living at the beck of others. The married man considers nothing worse than a wife, and the cares of marriage. The unmarried declares there is nothing so wretched as being unmarried, and wanting the repose of a home. The merchant thinks the husbandman happy in his security. The husbandman thinks the merchant so in his wealth. In short, all mankind are somehow hard to please, and discontented and impatient.
John Chrysostom
Let us consider the power of FAITH, as it is now being demonstrated, by a man who is well known to all of civilization, Mahatma Gandhi, of India. In this man the world has one of the most astounding examples known to civilization, of the possibilities of FAITH. Gandhi wields more potential power than any man living at this time, and this, despite the fact that he has none of the orthodox tools of power, such as money, battle ships, soldiers, and materials of warfare. Gandhi has no money, he has no home, he does not own a suit of clothes, but HE DOES HAVE POWER. How does he come by that power? HE CREATED IT OUT OF HIS UNDERSTANDING OF THE PRINCIPLE OF FAITH, AND THROUGH HIS ABILITY TO TRANSPLANT THAT FAITH INTO THE MINDS OF TWO HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE. Gandhi has accomplished, through the influence of FAITH, that which the strongest military power on earth could not, and never will accomplish through soldiers and military equipment. He has accomplished the astounding feat of INFLUENCING two hundred million minds to COALESCE AND MOVE IN UNISON, AS A SINGLE MIND. What other force on earth, except FAITH could do as much? There will come a day when employees as well as employers will discover the possibilities of FAITH. That day is dawning. The whole world has had ample opportunity, during the recent business depression, to witness what the LACK OF FAITH will do to business.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
[The wives of powerful noblemen] must be highly knowledgeable about government, and wise – in fact, far wiser than most other such women in power. The knowledge of a baroness must be so comprehensive that she can understand everything. Of her a philosopher might have said: "No one is wise who does not know some part of everything." Moreover, she must have the courage of a man. This means that she should not be brought up overmuch among women nor should she be indulged in extensive and feminine pampering. Why do I say that? If barons wish to be honoured as they deserve, they spend very little time in their manors and on their own lands. Going to war, attending their prince's court, and traveling are the three primary duties of such a lord. So the lady, his companion, must represent him at home during his absences. Although her husband is served by bailiffs, provosts, rent collectors, and land governors, she must govern them all. To do this according to her right she must conduct herself with such wisdom that she will be both feared and loved. As we have said before, the best possible fear comes from love. When wronged, her men must be able to turn to her for refuge. She must be so skilled and flexible that in each case she can respond suitably. Therefore, she must be knowledgeable in the mores of her locality and instructed in its usages, rights, and customs. She must be a good speaker, proud when pride is needed; circumspect with the scornful, surly, or rebellious; and charitably gentle and humble toward her good, obedient subjects. With the counsellors of her lord and with the advice of elder wise men, she ought to work directly with her people. No one should ever be able to say of her that she acts merely to have her own way. Again, she should have a man's heart. She must know the laws of arms and all things pertaining to warfare, ever prepared to command her men if there is need of it. She has to know both assault and defence tactics to insure that her fortresses are well defended, if she has any expectation of attack or believes she must initiate military action. Testing her men, she will discover their qualities of courage and determination before overly trusting them. She must know the number and strength of her men to gauge accurately her resources, so that she never will have to trust vain or feeble promises. Calculating what force she is capable of providing before her lord arrives with reinforcements, she also must know the financial resources she could call upon to sustain military action. She should avoid oppressing her men, since this is the surest way to incur their hatred. She can best cultivate their loyalty by speaking boldly and consistently to them, according to her council, not giving one reason today and another tomorrow. Speaking words of good courage to her men-at-arms as well as to her other retainers, she will urge them to loyalty and their best efforts.
Christine de Pizan (The Treasure of the City of Ladies)
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.
John Steinbeck (America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction)
8 April 1891 The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen in their shops and strollers on their pavements. How long must I suffer this? I have suffered it before, as a child, when, descending by chance to the servant's quarters, I overheard in astonishment their vile gossip, tearing up my own kind with their lovely teeth. This hostility to the entire race, this muted detestation of lynxes in human form, I must have rediscovered it later while at school. I had a repugnance and horror for all base instincts, but am I not myself instinctively violent and lewd, murderous and sensual? Am I any different, in essence, from the members of the riotous and murderous mob of a hundred years ago, who hurled the town sergeants into the Seine and cried, 'String up the aristos!' just as they shout 'Down with the army!' or 'Death to the Jews!
Jean Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas)
Dale turned back to slander the bitter hippie who was wearing a tie-dye shirt with colorful text that read ACID BATH. “Looks like someone forgot to take their micro-dose of acid today, or maybe you mistakenly consumed too much gluten for breakfast. Or perhaps you’re resentful for having woken up today realizing the world revolves around money instead of love and sexually transmitted diseases.” An eccentric expression crept onto the hippie’s face while he half-lifted his arms in surrender. “Hey man, crimson and clover, over and over.” Dale hadn’t the slightest idea what the man was talking about, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about colors and flowers. Or was clover a weed? Well, if he spotted these hippies in his backyard, he’d definitely remove them like weeds, even if their tie-dye shirts were colorful enough to deceitfully pass as flowers. Getting up close to them to smell their pungent odor, instead of a flower’s fragrance, would most surely be enough evidence to classify them as weeds. Stubborn weeds that attempted to buck the system by creeping up between logically placed cemented sidewalks that paved the way to buildings of high finance. He had crushed many of their kind under his polished shoes as he made his way toward the office. They were the dying remnants of a generation who thought pervasive love could spark a peaceful revolution. What they weren’t aware of was that love wasn’t more powerful than fucking. The honorable elite factions who hold the reins of an ordered society continually raped the hippie’s love movement until it was nothing more than acid flashbacks and bad hygiene, which conveyed the power of fucking over love.
Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
We’re loyal servants of the U.S. government. But Afghanistan involves fighting behind enemy lines. Never mind we were invited into a democratic country by its own government. Never mind there’s no shooting across the border in Pakistan, the illegality of the Taliban army, the Geneva Convention, yada, yada, yada. When we’re patrolling those mountains, trying everything we know to stop the Taliban regrouping, striving to find and arrest the top commanders and explosive experts, we are always surrounded by a well-armed, hostile enemy whose avowed intention is to kill us all. That’s behind enemy lines. Trust me. And we’ll go there. All day. Every day. We’ll do what we’re supposed to do, to the letter, or die in the attempt. On behalf of the U.S.A. But don’t tell us who we can attack. That ought to be up to us, the military. And if the liberal media and political community cannot accept that sometimes the wrong people get killed in war, then I can only suggest they first grow up and then serve a short stint up in the Hindu Kush. They probably would not survive. The truth is, any government that thinks war is somehow fair and subject to rules like a baseball game probably should not get into one. Because nothing’s fair in war, and occasionally the wrong people do get killed. It’s been happening for about a million years. Faced with the murderous cutthroats of the Taliban, we are not fighting under the rules of Geneva IV Article 4. We are fighting under the rules of Article 223.556mm — that’s the caliber and bullet gauge of our M4 rifle. And if those numbers don’t look good, try Article .762mm, that’s what the stolen Russian Kalashnikovs fire at us, usually in deadly, heavy volleys. In the global war on terror, we have rules, and our opponents use them against us. We try to be reasonable; they will stop at nothing. They will stoop to any form of base warfare: torture, beheading, mutilation. Attacks on innocent civilians, women and children, car bombs, suicide bombers, anything the hell they can think of. They’re right up there with the monsters of history.
Marcus Luttrell (Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10)
Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, ummah, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same version, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don't know. I do know that at the age of fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity. Most of us, including me, would prefer to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wonderous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don't want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space?
Karl Marlantes (What It is Like to Go to War)