Themes

"The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck Shone round him o'er the dead.Yet beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm; A creature of heroic blood, A proud though child-like form.The flames rolled on—he would not go Without his Father's word; That Father, faint in death below, His voice no longer heard."

"When boys go first to bed, They step into their voluntary graves."

"The only thing about a classroom more important to adolescent boys than whether girls are present is whether or not it is on fire.Advocates of coeducation will tell you that the boys are learning to regard the girls as "human beings" rather than as sexual objects. These are the kinds of people who imagine that most males anywhere, under any circumstances – short of affliction by senility, homosexuality, or Bella Abzug – ever refrain from regarding females as sexual objects. These are the "imaginative" types of people who run our schools. They tend to think that their sexual interest in budding adolescent girls is their own secret perversion. It happens to be shared by the boys in the school (as well as by all the other male teachers).If the educator is particularly creative and imaginative, he will suppose that these young "human beings" are learning a lot about life in their work together. What in fact the boys are learning is that unless they are exceptionally "bright' and obedient, they will be exceeded in their studies by most of the girls. Unless you are imaginative, you will see that this is a further drag on their already faltering attention to Longfellow's Evangeline. Clearly in a losing game in masculine terms, the boys react in two ways: They put on a show for the girls and dominate the class anyway, or they drop out. Enough of them eventually drop out, in fact, to disguise the otherwise decided statistical superiority of female performance in school. But they do not drop out soon enough to suit educators for whom aggressive boys are the leading problem in every high school."

"Huc venite iuvenes ut exeatis viri."

"Where the pools are bright and deep, Where the grey trout lies asleep, Up the river and over the lea, That’s the way for Billy and me."

"Boys always play better when they know the girls are watching."

"When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face."

"The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone, In the ranks of death you'll find him, His father's sword he has girded on, And his wild harp slung behind him."

"Better build schoolrooms for "the boy" Than cells and gibbets for "the man.""

"Mad about the boy, It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy. He has a gay appeal That makes me feel There may be something sad about the boy."

"I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys."

"Timothy Winters comes to school With eyes as wide as a football-pool, Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters: A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters."

"A little curly-headed, good-for-nothing, And mischief-making monkey from his birth."

"I feel lucky to be raising a boy now, in this moment. Boys today are on their way to learning a lesson that my generation was never really taught: that every person gets to decide whether they want to be touched or not. A whole army of children across the country are now growing up hearing parents and teachers tell them, over and over, that their bodies are their own. Yes, that means society will hold my son accountable for his sexual behavior in a way that earlier generations never had to deal with. But I don't see that as a loss.I hope that the growing concern about sexual violence will be accompanied by real change: recognition that our sons need better sex education, earlier, as well as frank conversations about porn, consent, and handling rejection. And I hope now that more people are questioning their assumptions about boys and pushing back against old-fashioned ideas about how we teach them to be men, our sons will have more latitude to explore who they want to be and what life they want to create."

"Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases."

"You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom, because you are capable of profiting by this discourse which I now deliver for your good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar.O running stream of sparkling joy To be a soaring human boy!"

"Come to my arms, my beamish boy!"

"School boys and discipline are almost by definition at odds with one another."

"The scouts' motto is founded on my initials, it is: be prepared, which means, you are always to be in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty."

"And six little Singing-boys,—dear little souls! In nice clean faces, and nice white stoles."

"The overall effect of Hitler Youth membership, some Social Democratic observers complained, was a ‘coarsening’ of the young. The suppression of any discussion or debate, the military discipline, the emphasis on physical prowess and competition, led boys to become violent and aggressive, especially towards young people who for whatever reason had not joined the Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth groups travelling by train amused themselves by insulting and threatening guards who failed to say ‘Hail, Hitler!’ every time they asked a passenger for his ticket."

"I think that if you had two desert islands, and you put girl babies on one island and boy babies on another island, and they were somehow able to survive with no help from adult society, eventually the girls would cooperate in collecting pieces of driftwood and using them to build shelters, whereas the boys would pretend that driftwood pieces were guns. (Yes, I realize they'd have no way of knowing what guns were. This would not stop them.)"

"No one has the right to make a boy learn Latin, because learning is a matter for individual choice; but if in a Latin class, a boy fools all the time, the class should throw him out, because he interferes with the freedom of others."

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

"To date, there are still very few published discussions of young boys' constructions of masculinity that unpack the heteronormativity in which it is produced. While some of the primary-school studies have explored how homophobic cultures operate to marginalize boys who are alternatively masculine and thus "feminized" and "homosexualized" via various forms of name-calling, very little research attention has focused on the diversity and ambiguity of boys' heterosexual cultures."

"Once upon a time, there was a jillionaire playboy who was blown up in a tremendous explosion. His brain survived. (Stomach too.) And was attached to the body of a stupid circus bear. I am that brain. My name is Hector Con Carne and I will one day rule the world!"

"When our Statesmen are in conversation with the defeated enemy, some airy cherub should whisper to them from time to time this saying: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World."

"World domination. The same old dream. Our asylums are full of people who think they're Naploeon. Or God."

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

"What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say "I want to rule the world," and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!"

"Total domination of the world by 1958."

"The United States, delighting in her resources, feeling that she no longer had within herself sufficient scope for her energies, wishing to help those who were in misery or bondage the world over, yielded in her turn to that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself."

"Nothing has changed in Russia's policy…. Her methods, her tactics, her maneuvers may change, but the pole star—world domination—is immutable."

"The world is not enough But it is such a perfect place to start...my love And if you're strong enough Together we can take the world apart...my love."

"This option the consumer retains of being able to buy security wherever he pleases brings about a constant emulation among all the producers, each producer striving to maintain or augment his clientele with the attraction of cheapness or of faster, more complete and better justice.If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers. The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another. In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up."

"Aldous Huxley was uncannily prophetic, a more astute guide to the future than any other 20th- century novelist. Even his casual asides have a surprising relevance to our own times. During the first world war, after America's entry, he warned: "I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all...Europe will no longer be Europe." His sentiment is widely echoed today, though too late for us to do anything about it. The worst fate for a prophet is for his predictions to come true, when everyone resents him for being so clear-eyed."

"In the entire world, there is not a single establishment of the security industry that is not based on monopoly or on communism. … Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them. Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?"

"Everywhere, when societies originate, we see the strongest, most warlike races seizing the exclusive government of the society. Everywhere we see these races seizing a monopoly on security within certain more or less extensive boundaries, depending on their number and strength.And, this monopoly being, by its very nature, extraordinarily profitable, everywhere we see the races invested with the monopoly on security devoting themselves to bitter struggles, in order to add to the extent of their market, the number of their forced consumers, and hence the amount of their gains.War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security."

"Since World War II, U.S. imperialism has stepped into the shoes of German, Japanese, and Italian fascism and has been trying to build a great American empire by dominating and enslaving the whole world. It is actively fostering Japanese and West German militarism as its chief accomplices in unleashing a world war. Like a vicious wolf, it is bullying and enslaving various peoples, plundering their wealth, encroaching upon their countries' sovereignty, and interfering in their internal affairs. It is the most rabid aggressor in human history and the most ferocious common enemy of the people of the world."

"But why should there be an exception relative to security? What special reason is there that the production of security cannot be relegated to free competition? Why should it be subjected to a different principle and organized according to a different system?"

"I'd vote for any party that would say "I won't allow people to throw garbage all over me." But none of the parties seem to be particularly interested. That's why I formed the World Domination League. It's a wonderful league, the World Domination League. The aims, as published in the manifesto, are total domination of the world by 1958. That's what we're planning to do. We've had to revise it. We're hoping to bring a new manifesto out with a more realistic target."

"Red China and Russia are having their differences. But we cannot take too much comfort in the fact that what they are debating about is not how to beat each other but how to beat us. They are simply arguing about what kind of a shovel they should use to dig the grave of the United States."

"To bargain freedom for security is the devil's bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security."

"National Security is the first responsibility of any government, that never changes."

"From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row."

"We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure."

"Everywhere, men resign themselves to the most extreme sacrifices rather than do without government and hence security, without realizing that in so doing, they misjudge their alternatives.Suppose that a man found his person and his means of survival incessantly menaced; wouldn't his first and constant preoccupation be to protect himself from the dangers that surround him? This preoccupation, these efforts, this labor, would necessarily absorb the greater portion of his time, as well as the most energetic and active faculties of his intelligence. In consequence, he could only devote insufficient and uncertain efforts, and his divided attention, to the satisfaction of his other needs.Even though this man might be asked to surrender a very considerable portion of his time and of his labor to someone who takes it upon himself to guarantee the peaceful possession of his person and his goods, wouldn't it be to his advantage to conclude this bargain?Still, it would obviously be no less in his self-interest to procure his security at the lowest price possible."

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

"There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity."

"For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself."