#ra

Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#history #literature #politics #defeat

First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?' If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain. ↗

— Daniel Kofman

#antiwar-movement #axis-of-evil #despotism #foreign-policy #foreign-policy-of-the-us

Let me tell you something you haven't learnt yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events - they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn't have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don't even notice at first, and then one day it's there. You wake up and you just don't have the fire anymore...Then you have a choice. You can either give in to what you're feeling, just say "okay, enough is enough" and be done with it, or you can fight it. You can accept that every day you're alive you're going to have to face it down, that you're going to have to say to yourself that you don't care what you feel, that it doesn't matter what happens anyway, that you're going to do what you have to because otherwise you're defeated and life doesn't have any real pupose left. When you can do that, little Wren, when you can accept the wearing down and the eroding, then you can do anything. How did I manage to keep going out nights? I just told myself I didn't matter all that much - that those in here mattered more. You know something? It's not so hard really. You just have to get past the fear. ↗

— Terry Brooks

#experience

The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them—violence. ↗

— Chris Hedges

#blowback #iraq #palestinians #terrorism #violence

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#perspective #terrorism #war #war-on-terror #wmd

The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be? ↗

— Glenn Greenwald

#iraq-war #poverty #terrorism #united-states #war

Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps--located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq. ↗

— Eric Weiner

#iraq #paradise #iraq

When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant our nation. ↗

— Al Franken

#bush #foreign-policy #iraq #nation-building #politics

It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#defensiveness #noam-chomsky #september- #iraq

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#logic #rationalisation #reason #september- #iraq