Saturday, January 1, 2011

Food for thought; January 2011;


"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."
Thich Nhat Hanh - Vietnamese monk, activist and writer.


So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious." Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)


"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." : Samuel P. Huntington

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests". Gore Vidal





3 comments:

Arija said...

So very true, divide and conquer, the end justifies the means. Most people have conveniently forgotten Machiavelli's treatise yet governments certainly use his dictum.

A Happy New Year to you my friend!

Ann, Chen Jie Xue 陈洁雪 said...

Happy New year to you.

How do you find your new Prime Minister. I was watching her with the Queensland premier. I thought, it was like New Zealand a few year back when women held the important jobs.

The floods up at Rockhampton is terrible. My sister went to University there.

Lavender and Vanilla Friends of the Gardens said...

Arija; thank you for your comment; not much has changed since we saw our face the first time in a puddle!
Happy New Year, dear Arija.

Ann; I used to like Julia Gillard. Now I am very disappointed with her, she has a flaw which I can't stand she is bias and she is just an other opportunist. It shows how she and some others have manipulated to push out Rudd, he was never my favourite but it was a dirty trick.
Yes, the floods are terrible, covering an area in Queensland as big as New south Wales.
Happy New Year to you Ann.