I hate with a murderous hatred those men who, having lived their youth, would send into war other youth, not lived, unfulfilled, to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.
--Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958), U.S. novelist
every now and then I come across quotes that hit home and make me recall why I'm supposed to keep on giving a damn.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.. . The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference
--Elie Wiesel
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
—Elie Wiesel
of course Wiesel is remarkable. I think I'd probably end up more like most of the people I've met who've lived through war.
I will never forgive them. Never. I will never be able to live without this hatred. I leave it to my children's children because I know my son can't forgive them either. See what happens when you kill? It lasts far beyond one lifespan. I'll never be the same. It's too much to ask. Don't ask me to forgive anyone. --Remzija, a Bosnian friend of mine (translated by her cousin)one of the hundreds I've met who've "survived" war.
Would [a Congress where women in all their diversity were represented] consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?
—Bella Abzug
ummm, unfortunately maybe, Bella.
A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946),
and someone else who thought maybe women would get it better . . .
the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
Nobody was ever converted by a simple phrase, but sometimes a good bumpersticker-sized slogan can give a healthy re-kick in the pants.
Here're a couple more.
War is a most uneconomical, foolish, poor arrangement, a bloody enrichment of that soil ...M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
War is not a life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T.S. Eliot
My kid, reading over over my shoulder, says this gets him through the day:
mmmm donuts.
--Homer Simpson
Which phrase has made a difference to you?