Defence Quotes - page 12
If Peter Mandelson has an historical parallel, it is Robespierre, the architect of the Terror. Without his zeal and cool passion for the right of the French people, the ancien regime would almost certainly have reasserted itself in some way. His defence of the ideals of the revolution was absolute and unmoving. It won him no friends, and eventually swallowed him. It would be a tragedy for Labour if it were to do the same to the architect of its own revolution.
Trevor Phillips
Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. - Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.
Abraham Lincoln
If you look at things that really affect people's lives - sport, the arts, charities - they were always at the back of the queue for government money - health, social security, defence, pensions were all way ahead. And each of those areas - sports, the arts, the lottery - got relatively petty cash from the government.
John Major
The Labour Party, obviously intends to fasten upon our backs the accusation of being 'warmongers' and they are suggesting that we have 'hush hush' plans for rearmament which we are concealing from the people. As a matter of fact we are working on plans for rearmament at an early date for the situation in Europe is most alarming... We are not sufficiently advanced to reveal our ideas to the public, but of course we cannot deny the general charge of rearmament and no doubt if we try to keep our ideas secret till after the election, we should either fail, or if we succeeded, lay ourselves open to the far more damaging accusation that we had deliberately deceived the people... I have therefore suggested that we should take the bold course of actually appealing to the country on a defence programme, thus turning the Labour party's dishonest weapon into a boomerang.
Neville Chamberlain
We should show ourselves firm in defence of collective peace. If we refuse to be scared or weakened by Germany's growing demands, if we resist the temptation to accept everything Germany asks for as a basis for discussion between us, if for a moment we can cease to be an honest broker and become the honest facer of truths, then I am confident that there is no call to view the future with alarm. If, on the other hand, we appear to the outside world to be weak and vacillating, if we allow The Times to continue to preach defeatism and to continue to be regarded as the organ of His Majesty's Government, then we shall encourage Germany's demands, and, no less serious, encourage the weaker powers to take refuge with her in the belief that the collective peace system can never be effective because England will never play her part in its support.
Anthony Eden
The central dilemma of Hayek's political philosophy is, given his view of the limited role reason can play in social life, how is it possible to mount a systematic defence of liberalism without falling victim to the very kinds of rationalism he criticises? This difficulty stays unresolved in Hayek's political thought because it is informed by two incompatible assumptions about what reason can achieve.
Friedrich Hayek
The first principle which Hindu society has to observe while preparing its defence is that it will stop processing and evaluating its own heritage in terms of ideas and ideals projected by closed creeds and pretentious ideologies. On the contrary, Hindu society will henceforward process and evaluate the heritage of these creeds and ideologies in terms of its own categories of thought, and find out the real worth of Christian, Islamic, Communist, and Modernist claims.
Sita Ram Goel
The key to the four modernizations is the modernization of science and technology. Without modern science and technology, it is impossible to build modern agriculture, modern industry or modern national defence. Without the rapid development of science and technology, there can be no rapid development of the economy. The Central Committee of the Party decided to call this national science conference in order to bring home to the Party and country the importance of science, to map out a programme, to commend advanced units and individuals and to discuss measures for speeding up the development of science and technology in China.
Deng Xiaoping
The pessimists are aristocrats like Byron; the men who curse God are aristocrats like Swinburne. But when those who starve and suffer speak for a moment, they do not profess merely an optimism, they profess a cheap optimism; they are too poor to afford a dear one. They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defence of life; that would be to delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.
G. K. Chesterton
I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, which ought to have ruled, plays the pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy - they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.
E. M. Forster
It is not right that the continued crucifixion of the Teacher should be regarded with complacency, while the world profits by the teachings, nor that she should be branded as fraud and impostor who brought to this age the truths now gaining such world-wide acceptance. It is but just that her defence should be obtainable so long as she is slandered. Therefore I - who reverence her as my first Teacher, and who keep her in my heart with unceasing gratitude as the one who led me to my Master, whom I have now served with ever-increasing thankfulness for more than eighteen years - place here on record the facts of the past, with such comment as seems necessary.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Every star, and every pow'r,
Look down on this important hour:
Lend your protection and defence
Every guard of innocence!
Help me my Henry to assuage,
To gain his love or bear his rage.
Mysterious love, uncertain treasure,
Hast thou more of pain or pleasure!
Chill'd with tears,
Kill'd with fears,
Endless torments dwell about thee:
Yet who would live, and live without thee!
Joseph Addison
This unjust and unexampled proceeding of the Court of Spain, by inforcing her demands on England through the channel and by the compulsion of a hostile power, denouncing eventually future war in conjunction, while Spain was still professing amity and friendship with Great Britain; and the full declaration and avowal at last made by the Spanish Ministry of a total union of councils and interests between the two monarchies of the House of Bourbon, are matters of so high and urgent a nature as call indispensably on His Majesty to take forthwith such necessary and timely measures as God has put into his hands, for the defence of the honour of his Crown, and of the just and essential interests of His Majesty's people.
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham
