International Quotes - page 70
![...The Festschrift [1932] dedicated to Spinoza may be said to be a praiseworthy international achievement. Its initiators were Germans and it appeared as a Sonderausgabe of a German newspaper. Spinoza had nothing in common with the German nation. The Germans, however, were the first to manifest serious interest in him. Their first great philosopher Leibniz went to seek his advice and his counsel; they were the only ones to invite him to lecture at their university. Even though Leibniz concealed him from the world, the Germans revealed him to the world. The generation of their greatest philosophers and poets from the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries grew up under his influence. Goethe read him together with Charlotte von Stein, and even read him together with her in Latin. To Hegel, Spinoza was "der Mittelpunkt der modernen Philosophie". (Baruch Spinoza)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/94/baruch-spinoza-achievement-advice-1015194.webp)
Spinoza is unsuitable as a patron philosopher of any contemporary movement, including the environmental and ecological. His system and his thinking in general are overwhelmingly complicated, and his terminology in central areas utterly foreign to contemporary jargons. But this does not exclude the possibility that he is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for those who look for a philosophy explicating deep attitudes and assumptions within certain parts of the international ecological and environmental movement. Admirers of Spinoza quite naturally tend to interpret him so as to minimize the conflicts between his and their thought. The result is a variety of representations of Spinoza. But if the intention is to provide more or less free reconstructions, well and good. And this is what is relevant, as I see it, in relation to what is sometimes called the "deep ecological movement" and the "green philosophy and ecopolitics."
Baruch Spinoza
What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.
You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?
I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.
Bernie Sanders
The former NSA analyst [Edward Snowden] mentioned the fact that Ecuador got $4.2 billion in funds from the International Monetary Fund in early March as a sign the country was getting closer to the West, and in turn more inclined to give up Assange. "Journalists who have been covering the story haven't really been looking at that, because Julian as an individual is such a tragically flawed figure,” Snowden said. Snowden also criticized people who changed their minds about Assange after the 2016 election."A lot of Americans now hate Julian,” he said. "Even though the sort of people who are on the center to the left part of the spectrum had been singing his praises during the Bush administration, now they're on the other side because of his unfortunate political choices in the 2016 elections.”.
Julian Assange
A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."
Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.
Václav Havel
Introductory books on Mawdūdī rarely refer to his views on jihād. These views are uncompromising, unapologetic, and very disturbing in their implications. Mawdūdī begins his short treatise, Jihād in Islam, with a definition of religion and a definition of nation: But the truth is that Islam is not the name of a "Religion”, nor is "Muslim” the title of a "Nation.” In reality Islam is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals. "Muslim” is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme. And "Jihād” refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Party brings into play to achieve this objective.
Abul Ala Maududi
Privatize everything, privatize the sea and the sky, privatize the water and the air, privatize justice and the law, privatize the passing cloud, privatize the dream, especially if it's during the day and open eyed. And finally, for the embellishment of so many privatizations, privatize the States, surrender once and for all their exploitation to private companies through international share offering. There lies the salvation of the world... and, while you're at it, privatize your whore mothers.
José Saramago
I, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, am here today to claim that justice which is due to my people, and the assistance promised to it eight months ago, when fifty nations asserted that aggression had been committed in violation of international treaties.
There is no precedent for a Head of State himself speaking in this assembly. But there is also no precedent for a people being victim of such injustice and being at present threatened by abandonment to its aggressor.
Haile Selassie
P. V. Narasimha Rao always tried to take the opposition into confidence. To cite a few examples, he had deputed Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the leader of the Indian delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva to discuss Pakistan-sponsored resolution to censure India on its record of human rights in Jammu & Kashmir, which was successfully thwarted. He had also nominated Shri Subramanian Swamy as Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, with a Cabinet-rank.
Manmohan Singh
The most important factor is how long are the supporters of those terrorists are keep going to keep supporting them, especially Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, with endorsements of some Western countries including United States, if you don't have that support it won't take more than a few months....That depends on how much the support of terrorist have in Turkey, in Saudi money to have more terrorists coming to Syria, their aim is to prolong the war, so they can prolong it if they want, they've already succeeded in that. That depends on that. If you're talking about how much is going to take as only Syrian conflict, isolated conflict, this is what it won't take for a few months but if it is not isolated conflict as it is the case today, with the interferences of many regional and international powers, it will be going to take some time, and no one has the answer as we have, of course, nobody knows how the war is going to develop...
Bashar al-Assad
And, in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?...In your day governments were accustomed, on the slightest international misunderstanding, to seize upon the bodies of citizens and deliver them over by hundreds of thousands to death and mutilation, wasting their treasures the while like water; and all this oftenest for no imaginable profit to the victims.
Edward Bellamy
It's difficult to separate the Uygurs from the barrage of anti-China denunciations coming from the US, most of which have a script familiar to those who follow America's 'soft' campaigns against its strategic enemies... The leading US media are invariably the cipher. 'In China, every day is Kristallnacht', declared The Washington Post [last November], likening China's treatment of the Uygurs to that of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.... That's not untypical; it reads as if it has been written by the US Agency for International Development or the National Endowment for Democracy, which fills in for the CIA. No one doubts the ruthless reaction of Beijing to separatists, but as a reporter, I would like to see for myself.
John Pilger
The work of this young professor (Thomasius) and his disciples was to dethrone the heavy Protestant orthodoxy which had nearly smothered German patriotism, to undermine the pedantry which had paralyzed German scholarship, to substitute thought for formulas, to bring right reason to bear upon international and municipal law, to discredit religious intolerance, to root out witchcraft persecution and procedure by torture from all modern codes, and to begin that emancipation, of public and especially university instruction from theological control, which has given such strength to Germany, and which today is invincibly making its way in all other lands, including our own.
Andrew Dickson White
Barack Obama's naïve, almost schoolyard-level attitude toward international politics is on display again today, as he says the US needs to set a better example for Russia: Obama: Russia, U.S. should not ‘charge into' other countries. This is normal "progressive" thinking, and you find these bizarre assumptions everywhere in leftist circles: if we just achieve some noble ideal of behavior, that alone will be enough to usher in a new era of peace and global good will - and in the meantime, it's important to let our adversaries know that we're not perfect and we understand their feelings.
Charles Foster Johnson
The level of historical ignorance and/or jingostic American exceptionalism necessary to believe this is impossible to describe. Compared to what the CIA has done to dozens of other countries since the end of World War II, and what it continues to do, watching Americans cast Russian interference in the 2016 election through online bots and email hacking (even if one believes every claim made about it) as some sort of unique and unprecedented crime against democracy is staggering. Set against what the CIA has done and continues to do to "interfere” in the domestic affairs of other countries - including Russia - the 2016 election was, at most, par for the course for international affairs and, more accurately, a trivial and ordinary act in the context of CIA interference.
Glenn Greenwald
This is the reason for the clear and unsparing summons to fight Bolshevism and international Jewry, whose race-destroying activities we have sufficiently experienced on our own people. Therefore, the alliance with all similar-minded Nations who, like Germany, are not willing to allow their strength, dedicated to construction and peaceful work at home, to be disrupted by alien ideologies as by parasites of a foreign race.
Erich Raeder
It is also alarming that our Western colleagues use the term "international law” less and less often. Instead, they talk more about a rules-based order... something they can invent themselves... We urge our colleagues to comply with the agreements reached within the framework of international law.
Sergey Lavrov
![We are already used to the fact that the United States and other Western countries simply announce in the media yet another set of accusations against Russia, be it hackers, or some kind of a sensation about the double or even triple poisoning of Navalny. All this news is funny to read, but it says only one thing -- or rather the manner in which this news is presented says only one thing -- that our Western partners do not have any ethical standards and lack skill in normal diplomatic work, and [have] unwillingness to comply with the international legal norms when it comes to finding the facts. (Sergey Lavrov)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/11/sergey-lavrov-comes-diplomatic-1009811.webp)
A major goal of investigating how cooperative norms in societal settings have been established is a better understanding of how to promote cooperative norms in international settings. This is not as utopian as it might seem because international norms against slavery and colonialism are already strong, while international norms are partly effective against racial discrimination, chemical warfare, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Because norms sometimes become established surprisingly quickly, there may be some useful cooperative norms that could be hurried along with relatively modest interventions.
Robert Axelrod
For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.
Henry Kissinger
Given Modi's determination to crack down and eliminate underworld dons and international crime syndicates who had deeply embedded links in the Congress and many "secular” parties, letting him survive or grow in strength would sound the death knell of the Congress and all such parties. Congress was the first to recognise this danger and therefore went gunning for Modi from the start quickly rallying all other compromised parties to join in the battle. As we shall see in later chapters, it was not Modi, but the Congress Party that played communally-divisive politics in order to derail Modi's inclusive development agenda With Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the prime minister having already dislodged the Congress Party in the Central government, the Congress Party was in dire need of an issue to target the BJP at the national level and Modi in Gujarat. The Godhra carnage and the riots that followed were the product of this desperation.
Madhu Kishwar
If I had to pick one year to represent the Fifties, I'd pick 1958. For one thing, it was the year that the folks at Wham-O, always looking for new ways to raise the level of American culture, gave us the Hula Hoop. This was a bright-colored plastic hoop that you spun around your hips using a hula-type motion. I realize that this sounds stupid, but you must trust me when I tell you, as one who participated extensively in this fad, that it really was stupid. In terms of intellectual content, the Hula Hoop made the Frisbee look like international championship chess.
Dave Barry
