#sm

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things, the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#pacifism #sacrifice #selfishness #war #men

Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#smoking #men

Absent a sense of the preciousness of one's own life, why respect the life of anyone else? ↗

— Kentetsu Takamori

#inspirational #life-lessons #religious #inspirational

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #philosophers #men

Tourists came around and looked into our tipis. That those were the homes we choose to live in didn`t bother them at all. The untied the door, opened the flap, and barged right in, touching our things, poking through our bedrolls, inspecting everything. It boggles my mind that tourists feel they have the god-given right to intrude everywhere. ↗

— Russell Means

#tipi #tourism #tourist #white-people #men

And I like a good horror story as much as the next person so long as they kill off some men too and not just girls. But the voices Joan heard were real. There’s clear and substantiated proof they were real. She won battles that would otherwise have been lost because of what those voices told her in advance of them allowing the French generals to strategize in ways completely different than they did before Joan came along. People’s lives were saved because of what those voices told her. ↗

— Meg Cabot

#funny #funny

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#god #noremorse #prayer #satanism #men

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders. ↗

— Sebastian Junger

#duty #patriotism #sacrifice #war #men

Greed kills us all. ↗

— Kentetsu Takamori

#inspirational #spiritual #inspirational

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention. ↗

— Sharon Salzberg

#inspirational #meditation #mindfulness #inspirational