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A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
— J.B. Priestley
The Holocaust never quite leaves Israeli Jews alone. Arabs use it against them and they use it against Arabs. Jews use it against other Jews. Even the president of the United States, it seems, can use it against the prime minister of Israel.
— David K. Shipler, from Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land
… had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of their children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
— John Brown (1800-hanged 1859), American abolitionist
Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
— Rudolf Giuliani
It would be an entirely different question if the country’s life was in danger, its existence at stake; then we would all come forward and stand by the flag, and stop thinking about whether the nation was right or wrong; but when there is no question that the nation is in any danger, but only some little war away off, then it may be that on the question of politics the nation is divided, half-patriot and half-traitors, and no man can tell the difference.
— Mark Twain
As we find in the history of all usurping governments, time changes anomaly into system, and injury into right; examples become custom, and custom ripens into law; and the doubtful precedent of one generation becomes the fundamental maxim of another.
— Henry Hallam (1777-1859), English historian
Government is essentially immoral.
— Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), English philosopher
All through history it’s the nations that have given the most to the generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall.
— Harry S Truman (1884-1972), 33rd President of the United States
I can see how sincere, how compassionately proletarian a religious prophet may be, that is the fate which sooner or later befalls him in a competitive society — to be founder of an organization of fools, conducted by knaves for the benefit of wolves. That fate befell Buddha and Jesus, it befell Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi, John Calvin and John Wesley.
— Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), American reformer, writer, muckracker
“The only alternative to war is peace, and the only road to peace is negotiations”
— Golda Meier
