#war

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated! ↗

— Charles Dickens

#humor #irony #medieval #middle-ages #nostalgia

If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is every completely right for any part, because part in a role is never real, so if you can't get someone who's perfectly right, it's more satisfying to get someone who's perfectly wrong. Then you know you've really got something. ↗

— Andy Warhol

#choices #decisions #right #role #warhol

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love. ↗

— Guy Sajer

#marriage #soldier #war #world-war-ii #age

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#genocide #ideology #politics #society #terrorism

It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#combat #values-in-life #war #warriors #age

With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive). ↗

— W.C. Sellar

#age

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#fyodor-dostoyevsky #notes-from-the-underground #slave #age

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. ↗

— George Orwell

#age #eight #expose #feelings #instinctive

You understand. I don't know. I am not sure how I would feel in your shoes. My mother wanted me. ↗

— Donna K. Childree

#adventure-stories #coming-of-age-novel #the-wayward-gifted #age

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves. ↗

— Rollo May

#self-awareness #age