My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leis...
I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.
Die Mode jener Jahre war umständlich und töricht. Die Männer knöpften sich steifleinerne Krägen um die Hälse, enge, überflüssige, unschöne Kleidungsstücke, und umwanden sie mühsam zu schlingenden, zwecklosen Binden, sogenannten Krawatten.
Named Harris," Bill said. "Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too." "Fortunate fellow," Mike said. "What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.
It is not a Buddhist approach to say that if everyone practiced Buddhism, the world would be a better place. Wars and oppression begin from this kind of thinking.
Humanity degenerating into one huge interconnected endlessly fragmenting fleshy sub-Reddit of weird fetishes and fucking doge memes, with the government periodically digging for information they can flog to advertisers and overseas power brokers to k...
History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimina...
To the world, it doesn’t matter that much. Until you remember that it means the world to the patient. One exact world, bright and full of sounds, per person. That is what is lost.
I felt as if I had no control over what I said, as if loathsome, ugly words were waiting inside me like snakes and toads looking for a chance to sneak out before I could stop them.
I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial... I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.
Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any conse...
God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.
Just as war is too important to leave it to the generals, science and technology are too important to leave in the hands of the experts.
The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a ya...
It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space.
Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this univer...
Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.
Because of the destruction of the Afghan and Iraqi infrastructure, the enormous problem of policing, the incredible expense of rebuilding, and the $700 billion U.S. defense budget, it was foreseeable that the “military conflict” there could go on...
There will come a time in your life when you lose something that matters to you. You'll fight for it and you won't win. But what really matters isn't the war you're waging, it's that you don't lose the person you are in the midst of the battle.
When we struggle to change ourselves we, in fact, only continue the patterns of self-judgement and aggression. We keep the war against ourselves alive.
Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?
