Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that soldiers understand the distinction between power and morality, showing that true rightness does not stem from brute force but from judicious leadership.
Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the complex relationship between authority and morality within military ranks. He explains that while soldiers may have flaws, they recognize that obedience to a leader does not equate to an endorsement of the leader's moral authority. Instead, it is the leader's responsibility to wield power rightly, suggesting that moral clarity is often overshadowed by the sheer force of numbers obeying commands, thus raising profound questions about the nature of right and wrong in contexts of power.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about military ethics in a classroom or seminar setting.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.
Is it not arrogance or narrow-mindedness to claim that there is only one way of salvation or that the way we follow is the right way? I think not. After all, do we fault a pilot for being narrow-minded when he follows the instrument panel while landing in a rainstorm? No, we want him to remain narrowly focused!
The less I have, the freer I am to do whatever I want to do.
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?
How could somebody be comfortable with authorizing legally the use of lethal force? My view is if you become comfortable with it, then you should get out of the job.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.