The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of ag...gression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There can be no reconciliation where there is no open warfare. There must be a battle, a brave boisterous battle, with pennants wa...ving and cannon roaring, before there can be peaceful treaties and enthusiastic shaking of hands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil... is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Italy, for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leo...nardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the fir...st case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle into the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the o...dds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of guerrilla warfare is to establish foci, or liberated areas, in the countryside and to set up small military units w...hich will gradually grow in strength, number and equipment--from squads to companies and regiments, eventually to divisions and armies, as in Yugoslavia and China during the Second World War--in order to fight battles against government troops. In the liberated areas, the guerrillas establish their own institutions, conduct propaganda and engage in other open political activities. None of this applies to terrorists, whose base of operations is in the cities, and who have to operate clandestinely in small units. Any major concentration would immediately expose them to retaliation by the government. The terrorists may be part of a political movement that engages in propaganda and other political activities (such as the IRA and the Basque ETA), but there is a strict division of labor between the legal and the military arms of the movement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After World War I, the objective factors for socialist revolution were less favorable than they are today and the subjective facto...rs more favorable. In 1919, the old ruling class was relatively intact throughout Europe, even in Germany, as were the old economic and political institutions; the masses were not in a revolutionary mood. In 1944, the German conquest of the continent and the political warfare waged by the Nazis have combined to destroy or hopelessly compromise the old ruling classes and to liquidate the property interests, political parties, trade unions and other institutions which formed the framework of pre-1939 European capitalism. In consequence, capitalism is everywhere discredited with the masses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »