When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the hypocrisy of those in power who promote peace while preparing for conflict.
Stefan Zweig's quote reflects on the contradiction often seen in governance, especially regarding war. Leaders who emphasize the need for peace may do so manipulatively, using rhetoric as a tool to mask their true intentions, which revolve around preparing for conflict. This duality serves to illustrate the moral complexities of leadership, where the prioritization of power can overshadow genuine aspirations for peace.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political debate about military intervention and its justifications.
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.
Seeing Anonymous primarily as a cybersecurity threat is like analyzing the breadth of the antiwar movement and 1960s counterculture by focusing only on the Weathermen.
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
Let us follow the truth whither so ever it leads.
Before I die many will die with me and they'll deserve it. See you in Hell.
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