"Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!" ~*~Jane Austen

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Food for Thought

I came across this quote while surfing the net and thought it was really interesting. Let me know what you think:

"No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather, the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one’s own morality and the neighbor’s immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor’s bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests."
-Nietzsche

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Its weird. The other day I was telling a friend of mine the exact same thing. Saala Nietzsche, stealing my theories

11:58 PM

 

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