I now have next to no hope of a restoration of the old Union.... If it is the settled and final judgment of any slave State that s...he cannot live in the Union, I should not think it wise or desirable to retain her by force, even if it could be done. But am I, therefore, to oppose the war? If it were a war of conquest merely, certainly I should oppose it.... But the war is forced on us. We cannot escape it. While ... perhaps in all the cotton-growing States, a deciding and controlling public judgment has deliberately declared against remaining in the Union, it is quite certain that in several States rebellious citizens are bent on forcing out of the Union States whose people are not in favor of secession.... If force had been employed to meet force, I believe several States now out of the Union would have remained in it.... The war ... for the defence of the capital, for the maintenance of the authority of the Government and the rights of the United States, I think is necessary, wise, and just.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production ...of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon rac...e is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bolkenstein, a Minister, was speaking on the Dutch programme from London, and he said that they ought to make a collection of diar...ies and letters after the war. Of course, they all made a rush at my diary immediately. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the "Secret Annexe." The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Freud's] views are remarkably similar to those of the great theorist of autocracy, Thomas Hobbes; for he, too, tried to build a s...ocial order on a psychology--and one emphasizing men's fears and passions. Just as Freud imagined that society began from a compact of the brothers who had slain their tyrant father and realized that only in union and renunciation could they avoid the war of all against all, so Hobbes saw men in the state of nature as engaged in ceaseless combat, with peace attainable only by renunciation of virtually all individual rights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then think I thus: sith such repair, So long time war of valiant men,... Was all to win a lady fair, Shall I not learn to suffer then, And think my life well spent to be, Serving a worthier wight than she?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Martha, your father told me something once, a long time ago, when I first started to work with him: In the war of science, many pe...ople must die before any victory can be won.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocr...atic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true.... Yet now ... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the f...irst the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind--men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh--who founded the English colonies in America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »