2) "Once I made weapons carved from stone, I tied the weight to a wooden handle, a club to break the bones of my enemy.Then I became wiser...and sharpened the stone to a point and then fastened it to a stick; my arrow. I bent wood and hitched string to it; my bow. I kill my enemy with skillThen I became wiser...and made weapons forged from steel and took care to sharpen the blade of my sword. I kill my enemy with a stroke.Then I became wiser...and made the rifle that would, by exploding gunpowder, shoot balls of lead faster than the eye could see. I kill my enemy with but the pull of a trigger.Then I became wiser...and I built flying machine that could transport bombs to drop over the homes of my enemy. I kill my enemy from the sky.Then I became wiser...and created the
, now I can guide a plane by remote control from one country and kill my enemy in another. I am a proficient killerThen I became wiser... and I found a way to split the atom and found the power of God hidden within. I kill the ground, scorch the sky, pollute the wind and kill my enemy with the push of a button.Then I became wiser...And I found that there is nothing more foolish than a ""Wise Man of War",Tonny K. Brown
3) "How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes
droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.","Michael Cunningham, The Hours"
4) "It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes
droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.",Michael Cunningham
5) "Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk
drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.","Heidi Julavits, The Uses of Enchantment"
6) "I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who
droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.","Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca"
7) "There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions stirred up the rubble. While I watched, an American observation plane
droned over the Japanese lines, spotting targets for the U.S. warships lying offshore. Suddenly the little plane was hit by flak and disintegrated. The carnage below continued without pause.Here I was safe, but tomorrow I would be there. In that instant I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.",William Manchester
8) "Hey Americans,” he screamed furiously at the
drones. “Brothers of the wolf, sisters of the wind, children of the Sun! Send the Choctaw warrior a quick and merciful death, instead of abandoning us into slavery or shameful capture.",George Sorbane
9) "I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops. If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable
drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually.","Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon"
10) "People in that robotic,
drone-like state, walking the earth with no set mission other than to survive another day. Missing the glory of the day, missing the potential for beauty and magic that each moment brings. Missing the gift of life, to walk in the footsteps of the mundane.","Tony Curl, Seriously Simple Stuff to Get You Unstuck"
11) For those suggesting criticisms of
drone kills should wait until the election: that'd be reasonable if he stops killing until the election.,Glenn Greenwald
12) "But since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed many times that number of people in Pakistan. Tens of thousands have died here in terror and counterterror violence, slain by bombs, bullets, cannons, and
drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24/7/365. The battlefield has been displaced. And in Pakistan it is much more bloody.","Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London"
13) "Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator
drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.","Molly Crabapple, Drawing Blood"
14) How were they to square the tremendous wealth they accrued with their image of themselves as frugal and virtuous? Easy: just argue that commerce was itself virtuous. To be rich in corrupt old Europe must be a sign of
droneishness, but to be rich in fresh young American was the fruit of hard work. The beehive provided Americans with the ideal image for their religion of work.
15) "Everyone, no matter what kind of job he or she has, fantasizes about freaking out at work. How many corporate
drones, stuck in a boring staff meeting, have had the sudden urge to jump on top of the conference table and start screaming obscenities? Strip off their clothes? Kiss the woman or man next to them? We all have. How many employees joke about shooting the boss or blowing the place up? I’m not suggesting we do any of these things, mind you, but let’s not kid ourselves; we all have a little murder in our heart.","Steve Dublanica, Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip-Confessions of a Cynical Waiter"
16) "[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will
drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.","Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose"
17) "We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant
drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.",Charles Frazier
18) "By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police
drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.","David Nicholls, Us"
19) "I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress
drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.","Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street"
20) "Our greatest power as nations and individuals is not the ability to employ assault weapons, suicide bombers, and
drones to destroy each other. The greater more creative powers with which we may arm ourselves are grace and compassion sufficient enough to love and save each other.","Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays"
21) "If I could make people feel, just for a day or an hour, what it’s like to love with infiniteness, then they would be animals no longer, but some greater creature, deserving of that title human. I’ve bettered a day though. On earth, they will have it thus: from birth to unavoidable death, a man is pumped so full of love that his eyes bleed rainbows and his mouth a barrel of miracles. His hands will heal then make monuments to commemorate it; they’ll press tight and pray for no man, no god but himself; and his mind… his mind will shower like spring rains. He will steal away from the shadow of ambition. He’ll be his own sun and light up the world with new marvels – be they art, philosophies, science – and in his brightness put the mundane, not himself, in shadows, and how rightfully. Each a captain and a maker, a mark-setter and stealer of shows... Earth’s skies will clap with the thunder of our majesty, not with violence, doubt, confusion, futility, and monotony; anything – anything – but the dull drone of duplication and robo-behaviour.","Richard Ronald Allan, Exit Eleonora"