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"Many people draw back at the spectacle of forceful repatriation to the countryside and the very brutal discipline employed to enforce it, although it could be argued that these were a consequence imposed by a revolutionary seizure of power in a situation made so exposed by the previous history. The tragedy of a revolution is not at all insurrection or the use of force against enemies—although it can be a tragic experience in another sense to be confronted with a bitter and cruel enemy aided by outside intervention, like the Chilean junta. The real tragedy occurs at those dreadful moments when the revolutionary impetus is so nearly lost, or so heavily threatened, that the revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on itself and over relatively innocent people in order not to be broken down and defeated." Raymond Williams   "We had been warned enough about the ring of guns the Germans had surrounded Paris with! We had been shown often enough that we could do nothing against their machine guns and tanks. Well, during that month of August the fighters you met in the streets were young people in shirtsleeves. All they had for weapons were revolvers, a few rifles, a few grenades, bottles of gasoline. Facing an enemy boxed in steel, they became intoxicated with the feeling of the freedom and the lightness of their movements. The discipline which they invented with each passing moment won out over discipline which had been learned. They tried—and made us try—the naked power of man. And we couldn't help thinking of what Malraux calls, in Man's Hope, the rehearsal of the apocalypse. Yes, it was the triumph of the apocalypse, of that apocalypse which is always defeated by the forces of order and which for once, within the narrow limits of this street fight, was victorious. The apocalypse: that is to say a spontaneous organization of revolutionary forces. All Paris felt, during that week in August, that man still had a chance, that he could still win out over the machine; and even if the battle had ended with the crushing of the Resistance forces, as it did in Poland, these few days would have been enough to prove the power of freedom." Jean-Paul Sartre   "Man has not developed in freedom. The member of the little band to which he had to stick in order to survive was anything but free. Freedom is an artifact of civilization that released man from the trammels of the small group, the momentary moods of which even the leader had to obey. Freedom was made possible by the gradual evolution of the discipline of civilization which is at the same time the discipline of freedom. It protects him by impersonal abstract rules against arbitrary violence of others and enables each individual to try to build for himself a protected domain with which nobody else is allowed to interfere and within which he can use his own knowledge for his own purposes. We owe our freedom to restraints of freedom." Friedrich Hayek   "You want, if possible—and there is no more insane 'if possible'—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible—that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?" Friedrich Nietzsche   "You wished, and still wish, to make your own, your own truly extreme fanaticism, into a rule of common life. You wish for an absurdity, an impossibility, a total negation of nature, man, and society. This wish is fatal because it forces you to spend your strength in vain, always shooting to miss. No man, however strong he is, and no society, however perfect its discipline and however powerful its organization, can conquer nature." Sergey Nechayev   "Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don't need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states." Barack Obama   "I, who make no other profession, find in myself such infinite depth and variety, that what I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realise how much I still have to learn. To my weakness, so often perceived, I owe my inclination to coolness in my opinions and any hatred for that aggressiveness and quarrelsome arrogance that believes and trusts wholly in itself, a mortal enemy of discipline and truth." Michel de Montaigne   "Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism—it is well to recall this today—is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth." José Ortega Y Gasset   "What do I see around me? Religious troubles, civil dissensions, the consternation of some, the audacity and uncontrollable fury of others, a government that is the slave of popular tyranny, the sanctuary of the laws surrounded by unruly men, who alternately want to dictate or disobey them; soldiers without discipline, leaders without authority, magistrates without courage, ministers without means, a king, the foremost friend of his people, plunged into bitterness, outraged, threatened, despoiled of all authority, and the public power no longer existing except in the clubs, where gross and ignorant men dare to make pronouncements on all political questions." Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal   "War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline." Walter Bagehot   "Agrarian society depends on the maintenance of a complex system of ranks, and it is important that these be both visible and felt, that they be both externalised and internalised. If they are clearly seen in all external aspects of conduct, in dress, commensality, accent, body posture, limits of permissible consumption and so forth, this eliminates ambiguity and thus diminishes friction. If a man's station and its rights and duties become part of his soul, his pride, this, once again, helps maintain social discipline. That great classic of the social theory of agrarian society, Plato's Republic, in fact defines morality in these very terms: morality consists of each element in the hierarchical social structure performing its assigned task, and no other." Ernest Gellner   "Violence was centrally important for fascism and communism, not simply as a means of acquiring power but as a transformative instrument, essential to forging a new social and political order. And so both movements brought the war home, domesticated its habits and sensibility, institutionalized its brutality and aggression. 'For us,' said one Italian Fascist, 'the war has never come to an end. We simply replaced external enemies with internal ones.' The army, Trotsky proclaimed, 'is that school where the party can instill moral hardness, self-sacrifice and discipline.' 'War,' Mussolini wrote in 1932, 'brings to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.' The regenerative power of combat, violence, and war, which before 1914 had been celebrated by a few theorists, was now accepted by men in charge of major European states." James Sheehan   "There is an early indicator of natural talent among history students. They are the people who are puzzled about what people might mean by this or that act or this or that statement. The rest are not in the least curious, because they are persuaded they already know. There is nothing to be done with them. The curious ones will go on being attentive to the mysteriousness of the apparently ordinary, and will continue to reap the benefits. And the benefits are inexhaustible, because history is the discipline which best teaches the individual how to assess the possibilities and the limitations of particular human situations, and the possibilities and limitations of the human will." Inga Clendinnen   "To say that a person has a duty to obey the state is merely another way of saying that the state has the right to compel obedience. Hence if political institutions and relationships comprise the subject matter of political philosophy, and if political obligation is the chief normative problem investigated by political philosophy, then this discipline is wedded to this notion of 'a right' and cannot function without it." George Hamilton Smith   "It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of 'understood necessity,' for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you cut your wrists. You have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness." Heda Margolius Kovály   "For at least three centuries Greek warfare mainly involved two bodies of men, in bronze armour, armed with spears and swords, marching towards each other in a tight formation, the phalanx. The Greeks could not have achieved that level of coordination without much practice and training (something the Persians dismissed contemptuously as dancing and gymnastics) but, equally important, without the discipline and social bonds that bound the men together. The soldiers, the hoplites, fought for their neighbours as much as for themselves. In the line each man's shield, carried on his left arm, protected his neighbour. 'Men wear their helmets and breastplates for their own needs,' went the saying, 'but they carry their shields for the men of the line.' When opposing Greek forces finally clashed, they entangled themselves in a struggling mass. The side that broke usually took heavier casualties as those fleeing were cut down. Mardonius, the Persian general who led massive invasions of Greece in the fifth century BC, is said to have complained to his king, Xerxes, that the Greeks fough each other in 'the foolish way through sheer perversity and doltishness.' The Persians were to learn in the most costly manner just what that Greek way of war could do to an enemy. At the crucial Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, where the Greeks fought a Persian force of perhaps twice their number, the hoplites outlasted Persian attacks attempting to break their enemy's lines. Herodotus claimed that 6,400 Persians lay dead on the field while the Greeks lost 203 men." Margaret MacMillan   "The first of the Scipios opened the way for the world power of the Romans; the second opened the way for luxury. For, when Rome was freed of the fear of Carthage, and her rival in empire was out of her way, the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in headlong course. The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new. The state passed from vigilance to slumber, from the pursuit of arms to the pursuit of pleasure, from activity to idleness." Velleius Paterculus   "What is needed today in Great Britain is more discipline—even more compulsion—first on the capitalists to run their establishments in the public interest or clear out, and on the men to work on the terms deliberately fixed by the community. Now that lock-outs and strikes are on a scale that is meant to starve out either large masses of men on the one hand or, on the other, the community of consumers, to permit them is a tragic absurdity. If we cannot find a constitutional way of doing this we shall drift into compulsion without democracy or free speech, a Communist splutter leading to a Fascist government. The workers have far too much to lose, and the bourgeoisie and aristocracy are far too able, for a dictatorship of the proletariat a la Russia. Are we of the Labour Party going to spend the next decades in fighting a Fascist Conservative government, with a growing Communist minority hanging on to us, to hamper our movements and trip us up? It is a melancholy prospect." Beatrice Webb   "The German press was particularly lavish in its praise for FDR. In 1934 the Völkischer Beobachter—the Nazi Party's official newspaper—described Roosevelt as a man of 'irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will' and a 'warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs.' The paper emphasized that Roosevelt, through his New Deal, had eliminated 'the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation' of the previous decade by adopting 'National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies.' After his first year in office, Hitler sent FDR a private letter congratulating 'his heroic efforts in the interests of the American people. The President's successful battle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration.' And he told the American ambassador, William Dodd, that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan 'The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual.'" Jonah Goldberg   "I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labour, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends." Paul Valery