Quotes about Conquest

Sometimes happiness is a blessing, but generally it is a conquest. Each day's magic moment helps.

Men have all been culturally designed with conquest, killing, or dying in mind. Even sissies. Early in life a boy learns that he must be prepared to fight or be called a sissy, a girl. Many of the creative men I know were sissies. They were too sensitive, too compassionate, to fight. And most of them grew up feeling they were somehow inferior and flunked the manhood test. I suspect many writers are still showing the bullies on the block that the pen is mightier than the sword. The test shaped us, whether we passed or flunked.
We are all war-wounded.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

History will never change because of politics or conquests or theories or wars; that's mere repitition, it's been going on since the beginning of time.  History will only change when we are able to use the energy of love, just as we use energy of the wind, the seas, the atom.

That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Mistakes are the inevitable accompaniment of the greatest gift given to man, - individual freedom of action. Let us be glad of the dignity of our privilege to make mistakes, glad of the wisdom that enables us to recognize them, glad of the power that permits us to turn their light as a glowing illumination along the pathway of our future. Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom. Without them there would be no individual growth, no progress, no conquest.

I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.

There is no pleasure in life equal to that of the conquest of a vicious habit.

Ruin seize thee, ruthless king! Confusion on thy banners wait! Though fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing, They mock the air with idle state.

Theodore Roosevelt, impatient with the excesses of "purely sentimental historians," authored his own stirring vindication of America's relations with the Indians: Looked at from the standpoint of the ultimate result, there was little real difference to the Indian whether the land was taken by treaty or by war. . . . No treaty could be satisfactory to the whites, no treaty served the needs of humanity and civilization, unless it gave the land to the Americans as unreservedly as any successful war. Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conflict, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is, indeed, a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. . . . It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of to-day. The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. . . . It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

The full-grown modern human being who seeks but refuge finds instead boredom and mental dissolution, unless he can be, even in his withdrawal, creative. He can find the quality of happiness in the strain and travail only of achievement and growth. And he is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of furfilment which his life-urges demand when his is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.

The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement.

The many meanings of "I Love You" "I love you" [is] a statement that can be expressed in so many varied ways. It may be a stage song, repeated daily without any meaning, or a barely audible murmur, full of surrender. Sometimes it means: I desire you or I want you sexually. It may mean: I hope you love me or I hope that I will be able to love you. Often it means: it may be that a love relationship can develop between us or even I hate you. Often it is a wish for emotional exchange: I want your admiration in exchange for mine or I give my love in exchange for some passion or I want to feel cozy and at home with you or I admire some of your qualities. A declaration of love is mostly a request: I desire you or I want you to gratify me, or I want your protection or I want to be intimate with you or I want to exploit your loveliness. Sometimes it is the need for security and tenderness, for parental treatment. It may mean: my self love goes out to you. But it may also express submissiveness: please take me as I am, or I feel guilty about you, I want, through you, to correct the mistakes I have made in human relations. It may be self-sacrifice and a masochistic wish for dependency. However, it may also be a full affirmation of the other, taking the responsibility for mutual exchange of feelings. It may be a weak feeling of friendliness, it may be the scarcely even whispered expression of ecstasy "I love you, " - wish, desire, submission, conquest: it is never the world itself that tells the real meaning here.

The progress of the industrial age rests on the greater diversification of labor and the use of more elaborate tools and machinery which have increased productivity-in other words, saved labor. . . . In our attempt to cure the social ills, we should not kill the goose that has laid the golden eggs. If our society is sick, it is for other reasons than the conquest by man of the forces of nature.

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.

Real glory springs from the silent conquest of ourselves.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and all its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensities to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. . . . the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

It takes a highly intellectual individual to enjoy leisure. . . . Most of us had better count on working. What a man really wants is creative challenge with sufficient skills to bring him within the reach of success so that he may have the expanding joy of achievement. . . . Few people overwork; plenty overeat, overworry, overdrink. . . . Few realize real joy and happiness of conquest. The basis of mental health for the average adult is more work, provided the work is not mere drudgery.

On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they [the Colonies] raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared,-a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.

Secretary of State under Roosevelt, testifying before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack in regard to remarks he had made to the War Council on November 28, 1941. I emphasized that in my opinion the Japanese were likely to break out at any time with new acts of conquest and that the matter of safeguarding our national security was in the hands of the Army and the Navy. With due deference I expressed my judgement that any plans for our military defense should include an assumption that the Japanese might make the element of surprise a central point in their strategy and also might attack at various points simultaneously with a view to demoralizing efforts of defense and of coordination.

Our moral and ethical responsibility is to protect other species in the spirit of husbandry rather than destroy them in and attitude of conquest.

No "revisionist" historian of recent decades has excoriated the Spanish Conquest more thoroughly than Bartolomé de Las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus and the first priest to be ordained in the Americas: "The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed. . . . Their insatiable greed and overweening ambition know no bounds; the land is fertile and rich, the inhabitants simple, forbearing and submissive. The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset) not as brute animals - indeed, I would to God they had done and had shown them the consideration they afford their animals - so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road. They have had as little concern for their souls as for their bodies, all the millions that perished having gone to their deaths with no knowledge of God and without the benefit of the Sacraments. One fact in all this is widely known and beyond dispute, for even the tyrannical murderers themselves acknowledge the truth of it: the indigenous peoples never did the Europeans any harm whatever; on the contrary, they believed them to have descended from the heavens, at least until they or their fellow citizens had tasted, at the hands of these oppressors, a diet of robbery, murder, violence, and all other manner of trials and tribulations."

The honor of the conquest is rated by the difficulty.

In the course of history, all empires have been created with premeditation, by an effort often sustained over several generations. Every power has been Roman to a degree. The United States is the first nation to become the most powerful in the world without having sought to be so. Its exceptional energy and organization have never been oriented toward conquest.

When the Russians succeeded in putting the first satellite into orbit, one of their scientists is reported to have said, "Now that we have conquered space, our next conquest is that of man." An American anthropologist, Leslie A. White, of the University of Michigan, is reported in a Detroit newspaper as saying, "A cultural system which can launch earth satellites can dispense with Gods entirely." This is a great day for the false scientist-they who have left God out of their education. Of these the Apostle Paul even in his day warned his weakening convert, Timothy, to beware of: O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called. (I Timothy 6 :20.)

The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

Modern critics of the Conquest have an unlikely ally in the eighteenth-century prophet of laissez-faire economics: "It is not by the importation of gold and silver, that the discovery of America has enriched Europe. ...The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began t o take place which had never been thought of before, and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries."