A Quote by Ernest Becker

War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.

Ernest Becker

Quote Topics

Classes Enemies Foreign Happy Hatred Occasion Popular Ruling Ruling Class Safety Sociological Valve War

Quote Author

Ernest Becker
American - Anthropologist
September 27, 1924 - March 6, 1974

I do not have regrets. I believe I helped preserve the peace for this country. Why should I regret that? What I accomplished was approved by Congress -- which represents our people. All of you live in safety from domestic enemies because of security from the police. Likewise, you live in safety from foreign enemies because our military keeps them from attacking us.

Hyman Rickover

But if we’re going to kill them all, we might as well make an occasion of it.” Toshak shrugged. “Do as you wish,” he said. “Occasion or not, as long as they’re all dead, I’m happy.

John Flanagan

If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.

Karl Marx

Libertarians have always battled the age-old scourge of war. They understood that war brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family and economic life, and put more power in the hands of the ruling class - which might explain why the rulers did not always share the popular sentiment for peace. Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their own societies against foreign threats; but throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on all sides of the conflict.

David Boaz

Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies)-just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden on the rest.

Kenneth Kaunda

War is possible only if you have a lot of enemies. If all the enemies get together and form one front - if you cut down the number of enemies - there would be no war.

Albert Kesselring

All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.

Frank Zappa

No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!

Vladimir Lenin

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

George Orwell

To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.

Fernando Pessoa

I don't think we should be engaged in nation-building. It's not our job to turn foreign nations into democratic utopias, to try to turn Iraq into Switzerland. It is the military's job to hunt down and kill our enemies, to kill ISIS before they murder American citizens and they wage jihad.

Ted Cruz

It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

It is only through an abandonment of the idea that those entrusted with power have an exclusive right to decide upon war, and the substitution of a public opinion equipped with all the facts and taken into the confidence of the ruling classes, that peace can be assured to the world.