#is

Based on the considerations of history, ancient history, and international axioms, the logic of following up a citizen with his shadow for the purpose of the demarcation of political frontiers of any state has been discounted for international conventions. For example the Arabs cannot ask Spain just because they were there some time in the past nor can they ask for any other area outside the frontiers of the Arab homeland ↗

— Saddam Hussein

#arabism #arabs #axioms #expansionalism #imperialism

Better not to plant seeds of selfishness than try to eradicate them once they have grown into giant weeds. (91) ↗

— Prem Prakash

#yoga

Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#interventionism #iraq #iraq-war #saddam-hussein #iraq

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops. ↗

— Nataly Kelly

#language #linguistics #translation #iraq

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times. ↗

— Bernard Beckett

#curiosity #fear #fragile #optimism #spirit

Virtue is under certain circumstances merely an honorable form of stupidity: who could be ill-disposed toward it on that account? And this kind of virtue has not been outlived even today. A kind of sturdy peasant simplicity, which, however, is possible in all classes and can be encountered only with respect and a smile, believes even today that everything is in good hands, namely in the "hands of God"; and when it maintains this proportion with the same modest certainty as it would that two and two make four, we others certainly refrain from contradicting. Why disturb THIS pure foolishness? Why darken it with our worries about man, people, goal, future? And even if we wanted to do it, we could not. They project their own honorable stupidity and goodness into the heart of things (the old God, deus myops, still lives among them!); we others — we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more mistrustful wisdom. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#common #morality #nihilism #people #simplicity

Manifest plainness, Embrace simplicity, Reduce selfishness, Have few desires. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#envy #greed #illusions #selfishness #simplicity

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault. ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#creativity #criticism #wisdom #wisdom-quote #wise

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self. ↗

— Søren Kierkegaard

#anxiety #self-discovery #consciousness

The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality. ↗