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Quote of the Day: Gunfire or Lullabies
Food for thought. I have always loved this quote. It comes from a man who fought in Okinawa in World War II.
Published in General
Well, the hand that rocks the cradle and all that.
I thought gunfire was a lullaby?
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Both. The sound of goodly men doing vicious violent acts against those of evil intent allows for the regular hearing of soothing sounds on the homefront. Evil must be dealt with or no one may rest at peace.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” George Orwell
It will the sounds of dying people
Love Maxwell. Also love the Maxwell Institute named for him. They do good work.
That’s a lovely question.
There’s a difference between “history,” per se, and what shapes the life we live. History, to the extent that it’s what is taught in textbooks, will probably always feature the obvious moments of chaos and destruction that capture our attention.
But our lives are good mostly because of what won’t make the history books simply because it’s too quotidian and prosaic: our small traditions, our customs, our voluntary relationships. Markets work when people are left to do small things over and over, to make a billion little deals and earn a billion little profits. Families work when people show some respect for habits and values that have evolved over centuries and that create the environments within which children flourish and absorb those traditions. Civil society works when we are mindful of the hard-won gifts from our founders, the ideas of limited government and divided powers and Constitutional guarantees.
It won’t be war and gunfire that cost us those things, but erosion, the weathering of our founding principles by the endless abrasive gale of progressive good intentions.
Gun, With Occasional Music.
According to Wikiquote, that is a misattribution, although he did say similar things.
Thucydides wrote that there will always be war because human nature does not change. The truth of this seems beyond doubt, given that all utopian schemes for the creation of a New Man have failed miserably and disastrously. The best we can hope for is occasional periods of relative peace.
Or, to put it another way