I went to work for the Civil Service. I'd wanted to work for the Ministry of Defence because I had some far-fetched idea that it had something to do with the Avengers, but I ended up in Social Security.
No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
If today is anything like the typical day of the past 3 years, three American soldiers will die in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Taliban will get a little stronger in Afghanistan and the civil war will continue to be enhanced in Iraq.
Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.
When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.
I was born into Sudan's civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.
This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.
I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
Now that it's officially summer, here's my advice to parents who want to continue teaching their kids during the next two months and learn something themselves: visit Civil War battlefields.
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was f...
Van Gogh on his brother's upcoming marriage: "It’s because he’s in Holland, where he’s getting married one of these days. Now, while not denying the advantages of a marriage in the very least, once it has been done and one is quietly set up in ...
The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he’s but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves...
Lone Watie: [realizes Josey has snuck up behind and pulled a gun on him] They said a man could get rich on reward money if he could kill you. Josey Wales: Seems like you was looking to gain some money here. Lone Watie: Actually, I was looking to gain...
for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
...People so often ignored their gut because of social niceties and expectations. Luckily Dax didn't have that issue; he was barely fucking civilized.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
[...]How can a great civilization have destroyed itself so completely?" "Perhaps,"said Apollo, "by being materially great and materially wise and nothing else.
