Notable Quotable #20

Sep 27, 2022

"You probably don't need more weapons than what's required to destroy every city on earth. There's only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons - well, we've got more than 25,000!"

- Carl Sagan

"We must eliminate all nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the grave risk they pose to our world. This will require persistent efforts by all countries and peoples. A nuclear war would affect everyone, and all have a stake in preventing this nightmare."

- Ban Ki-moon

"It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives."

- Robert McNamara

“So long as nuclear weapons continue to exist, so will the temptation to threaten others with overwhelming military force.”

- Daisaku Ikeda

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“A man who governs his passions is master of the world. We must either command them or be enslaved to them. It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.”

- St Dominic Guzman

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

- John Keats

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”

- Jim Morrison

"There’s only one way to liberate yourself from the evil of governmental organization: refuse to participate in the violence that sustains the state."

- Leo Tolstoy

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”

- J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit