Attack Quotes - page 55
If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whose defence civilization depends, and to divide them. The responsibility of this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.
Karl Popper
In times past, the question usually asked by women was "How can we best help to defend our nation?" I cannot remember a time when the question on so many people's lips was "How can we prevent war?"
There is a widespread understanding among the people of this nation, and probably among the people of the world, that there is no safety except through the prevention of war. For many years war has been looked upon as almost inevitable in the solution of any question that has arisen between nations, and the nation that was strong enough to do so went about building up its defenses and its power to attack. It felt that it could count on these two things for safety.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Many societies just take affirmative action for granted. India has a system called reservation, which was instituted back in the 1940s in an attempt to overcome deep-seated caste and gender inequities. Any such system imposes hardships on some in order, one hopes, to develop a more equitable and just society. But to a large extent I think the attack on affirmative action is an attempt to justify the kinds of discriminatory and oppressive patterns that existed in the past. On the other hand, such systems should certainly be designed so that they don't harm poor people who happen not to fit the categories designated for support. This can be done. There have been very effective applications of affirmative action - in the universities, for example, and the public-service industries. If you look in detail you find plenty of things to criticize, but the main thrust of the program is humane and appropriate.
Noam Chomsky
The dream of conquering the vastness of space--the dream of partnership across the Atlantic--and across the Pacific as well-the dream of a Peace Corps in less developed nations--the dream of education for all of our children--the dream of jobs for all who seek them and need them--the dream of care for our elderly--the dream of an all-out attack on mental illness--and above all, the dream of equal rights for all Americans, whatever their race or color--these and other American dreams have been vitalized by his drive and by his dedication. And now the ideas and the ideals which he so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.
Lyndon B. Johnson
We have also worked to avoid war by miscalculation. There may be little time for decision between our first warning and our need to reply. If our weapons could be easily destroyed, we would have to make the final decision in a matter of minutes. By protecting our power against surprise attack, we give ourselves more time to confirm that war has actually begun. Thus, we have placed missiles in protected, underground sites. We have placed missiles beneath the seas. And we have provided constant and secure communication between strategic forces and the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States.
Lyndon B. Johnson
They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all Nature like that - at the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told me something about them which I could not understand, but I am convinced that they were somehow in touch with the stars, not only in thought, but by some living channel.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I - granted the rules were violated at times - we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn't make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler's philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population.
Ronald Reagan
