Ken Gillespie famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

  • We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

  • Violence begets violence by whomever used. War is a dirty business and entails the use of degrading means, whoever wages it.

  • Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

  • A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that.

  • Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

  • This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

  • Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain. Fancy giving money to the Government! Nobody will see the stuff again. Well, they've not idea what money's for- Ten to one they'll start another war. I've heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor'! Fancy giving money to the Government!

  • Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

  • In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist. I call it the law of the instrument , and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.

  • I don't think it's fair - you get married, you give your wife a wedding ring. I think you should give her a mood ring. Oh, it may sound crass, but just check the color when you come home. 'Hi honey. Infernal red? Oh boy, I ain't getting laid, and I gotta cut the lawn, I know it.'

You may also like: