Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the nature of modern warfare as a collective effort involving state institutions against able-bodied individuals.
Simone Weil articulates the essence of modern warfare as a collective struggle where all of a nation's resources and institutions unite to combat every citizen capable of fighting. This perspective emphasizes the pervasive impact of war on society, suggesting that the state mobilizes not just military might but also utilizes the full weight of its bureaucratic apparatus against a significant portion of its population.
In practice
During a discussion on the effects of government during wartime.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
The universe is alive and conscious, and it responds to our intent when we have our intimate relationship with the universe and see it not as separate but as our extended body.
I think that if anything can be proved by natural theology, it is that slavery is morally wrong. God gave man a mouth to receive bread, hands to feed it, and his hand has a right to carry bread to his mouth without controversy.
Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.
Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.
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