A Quote by Edward Gibbon
It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.
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Now, since everything else is furnished with the exact amount of needle and thread required to maintain its being, it is in truth incredible that we alone should be brought into the world in a defective and indigent state, in a state such that we cannot maintain ourselves without external aid.
Their military training will ensure success in war, but they must maintain unity by not allowing the state to grow to large, and by ensuring that the measures for promotion and demotion from one class to another are carried out. Above all they must maintain the educational system unchanged; for on education everything else depends, and it is an illusion to imagine that mere legislation without it can effect anything of consequence.
Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.
All large political doctrines are rich in difficult problems - problems that are quite above the average citizen's reach. And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fuss and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.
Idleness and timidity often despair without being overcome, and forbear attempts for fear of being defeated; and we may promote the invigoration of faint endeavors, by showing what has already been performed.
For a time Jack was angry; but when he had been without the jacket for a short while he began to realize that being half-clothed is infinitely more uncomfortable than being entirely naked. Soon he did not miss his clothing in the least, and from that he came to revel in the freedom of his unhampered state.
When economist William Beveridge dreamed up the postwar welfare state he wanted to fight five 'giant evils' - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Fast forward 65 years and it seems the last New Labour government grew an Unfair State that fuelled - not fought - one of those evils: idleness.
The saddest part of my career has been missing the Olympic medal by one-hundredth of a second.
I've rarely done anything that's overtly self-destructive without consciously knowing what I'm doing. And then of course, the astute journalist jumps forward and says, "Why are you being calculated?" Calculated seems to assume a sinister intent. My intent is always for artistic effect.
You're always in a rush, or else you're too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.
I am cynical about politicians. My experience of politicians has been thoroughly negative. I have found that politicians are people that can not be taken at face value. There are very few politicians I have been impressed with.
Without freedom there will be no firearms among the people; without firearms among the people there will not long be freedom. Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms.
Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.
The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it ... is, for all members of the state ... the rule of what is just or unjust.
I've been talking to people all over the country, city council members, grassroots leaders, party leaders, members in Congress - and you know what? The truth is I'll have something to say real soon.
The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.
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