Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.
A country that is governed by its national army can never be morally free and, therefore, its so-called weakest member can never rise to his full moral height.
Besides the progress of industry and technique, we see a growing discontent among the masses; we see, besides the expansion ("expansion,", Fr.) of instruction, distrust and hatred expanding among nations ("s'étendre la méfiance et la haine entre," Fr.), that vie with one another ("qui rivalisent à l'envi," Fr.), by the increase of their armies and the improvement of their engines of murder ("engins meurtriers", Fr).
Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".
But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated,
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill;
The Ploughboy is whooping — anon — anon!
There's joy in the mountains:
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing;
The rain is over and gone.
So I didn't pass. It was the army's decision that they didn't want me to go into the service. They're the boss. I don't want to say no whole lot about it.
I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.
Good infantry is without doubt the sinews of an army; but if it has to fight a long time against very superior artillery, it will become demoralized and will be destroyed.