All Quotes

"We must admit that it is extremely difficult to formulate a theory sufficiently general to encompass all possible sufficient causes of wars. With regard to necessary causes, however,... it is weapons. Without weapons wars could not be fought. We are told that, deprived of weapons, people would still fight with sticks and stones. This, however, need not concern us. We are concerned not just with fighting but with the sort of mass insanity that can destroy the entire civilization, the product of millenia of accumulated effort, in a matter of hours. And this can be done only with real, up-to-date weapons, not sticks and stones."

"[Education] seems to be the only hope: to spread enlightenment sufficiently wide so that people can no longer be manipulated to give consent to policies that will surely eventually lead to their own destruction."

"The American Revolution was ignited by the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’, a slogan suggested by democratic ideals... Ought not the present day version of the old slogan be ‘No annihilation without representation?"

"To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us."

"Centralization of society's vital services in giant computer centers, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, air- traffic control centers, 100-story skyscrapers, and government compounds increases its vulnerability. ... choosing his targets, today's saboteur could pollute a city's water supply, dynamite power transmission towers, cripple an airport control center, destroy a corporate or government computer center."

"The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality."

"The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation."

"In the US. Infantry Manual published during World War II, the soldier was told what to do if a live grenade fell into the trench where he and others were sitting: to wrap himself around the grenade so as to at least save the others. (If no one "volunteered," all would be killed, and there were only a few seconds to decide who would be the hero.)"

"Anatol Rapoport is a pioneer and lead-figure of the systems sciences, studies in conflict & cooperation, and peace research. He is professor emeritus of Psychology and Mathematics at the University of Toronto, Canada... Rapoport has spearheaded many scientific innovations, including the application of mathematical methods, first to Biology and later to the Social Sciences. Moreover, he is one of the rare thinkers who have contributed significantly to "marrying" philosophy and science. The originality and rigor of his thinking make his theoretical oeuvre extraordinarily resourceful, as well as unique in its ethical substance and esthetical appeal. Rapoport operates from a multidimensional background of experience and studies (see the following C.V.), embodying a deep humanistic commitment (cf. Rapoport 1994), and a profoundly systemic thinking."

"The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod's legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent's work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism."

"Short on glamour and long on tragedy."

"A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist."

"A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them? The second and third generations, of what numbers and stuff will they be? How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger — one of the waxen wings of flight. It may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge."

"“He was, and ever will remain, the Sir Galahad of Canadian politics” (Marquis 1903, p. 418)"

"Once early in the morning, at two or three in the morning, when the master was asleep, the books in the library began to quarrel with each other as to which was the king of the library. The dictionary contended quite angrily that he was the master of the library because without words there would be no communication at all. The book of science argued stridently that he was the master of the library for without science there would have been no printing press or any of the other wonders of the world. The book of poetry claimed that he was the king, the master of the library, because he gave surcease and calm to his master when he was troubled. The books of philosophy, the economic books, all put in their claims, and the clamor was great and the noise at its height when a small low voice was heard from an old brown book lying in the center of the table and the voice said "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want". And all of the noise and the clamor in the library ceased, and there was a hush in the library, for all of the books knew who the real master of the library was."

"When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing to himself."

"There is an aphorism about a farmer who before sunrise on a cold and misty morning, saw a huge beast on a distant hill. He seized his rifle and walked cautiously toward the ogre to head off an attack on his family. When he got nearer, he was relieved to find that the beast was only a small bear. He approached more confidently and when he was within a few hundred yards the distorting haze had lifted sufficiently so that he could recognize the figure as only that of a man. Lowering his rifle, he walked toward the stranger and discovered he was his brother."

"A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults."

"The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going? But when a man is caught in such a position he is judged only by his error and seldom given credit for the times he has extricated himself from worse situations. Worst of all, blame is heaped upon him by other pilots, all of whom have been in parallel situations themselves, but without being caught in them. If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one's outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?"

"Walked to Bill Castle's home at 6:00 — about ten minutes from the Anchorage. Fulton Lewis was the only other person there. The three of us had dinner together and discussed the European situation and the action this country should take if war breaks out over there. We are disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence in our press, radio and motion pictures. It may become very serious. Lewis told us of one instance where the Jewish advertising firms threatened to remove all their advertising from the Mutual system if a certain feature were permitted to go on the air. The threat was powerful enough to have the feature removed."

"The pressure for war is high and mounting. The people are opposed to it, but the Administration seems to have ‘the bit in its teeth’ and is hell-bent on its way to war. Most of the Jewish interests in the country are behind war, and they control a huge part of our press and radio and most of our motion pictures. There are the ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘Anglophiles,’ and the British agents who are allowed free rein, the international financial interests, and many others."

"Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?"

"The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration. Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government."

"Now, all that I feared would happen has happened. We are at war all over the world, and we are unprepared for it from either a spiritual or a material standpoint. Fortunately, in spite of all that has been said, the oceans are still difficult to cross; and we have the time to adjust and prepare... We can, of course, be raided; but unless we let ourselves go completely to pieces internally, we cannot be invaded successfully. But this is only one part of the picture. We are in a war which requires us to attack if we are to win it. We must attack in Asia and in Europe, in fact, all over the world. That means raising and equipping an army of many millions and building shipping, which we have not now got. And after that, if we are to carry through our present war aims, it probably means the bloodiest and most devastating war of all history."

"We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely. Possibly the world will come to its senses sooner than I expect. But, as I have often said, the environment of human life has changed more rapidly and more extensively in recent years than it has ever changed before. When environment changes, there must be a corresponding change in life. That change must be so great that it is not likely to be completed in a decade or in a generation."

"Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be."

"The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day, the sound of our artillery bombarding this Japanese stronghold has floated in across the water. This afternoon, I stood on the cliff outside our quarters (not daring to sit on the ground because of the danger of typhus) and watched the shells bursting on the ridge. For weeks that handful of Japanese soldiers, variously estimated at between 250 and 700 men, has been holding out against overwhelming odds and the heaviest bombardment our well-supplied guns can give them. If positions were reversed and our troops held out so courageously and well, their defense would be recorded as one of the most glorious examples of tenacity, bravery, and sacrifice in the history of our nation. But, sitting in the security and relative luxury of our quarters, I listen to American Army officers refer to these Japanese soldiers as "yellow sons of bitches." Their desire is to exterminate the Jap ruthlessly, even cruelly. I have not heard a word of respect or compassion spoken of our enemy since I came here. It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy — for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts."

"What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific."

"It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time."

"Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter."

"If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes."

"I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve."

"The wild world is the human world. Having evolved in it for millions of centuries, we are not far removed by a cloth of civilization. It is packed into our genes. In fact, the more power-driven, complex and delicate our civilization becomes, the more likelihood arises that a collapse will force us back to wildness. There is in wildness a natural wisdom that shapes all Earth's experiments with life. Can we tap this wisdom without experiencing the agony of reverting to wildness? Can we combine it with intellectual developments of which we feel so proud, use it to redirect our modern trends before they lead to a worse breakdown than past civilizations have experienced? I believe we can, and that to do so we must learn from the primitive."

"Looking at the mirror of life first caused me to question our civilization's trends. During years spent flying civil air routes and on military missions, I watched changes of shade and texture on the great surface below my wings. Stumplands appeared where forests were. Lakes climbed mountainsides. Ditches gridded marshlands: dust hazed prairies, highways, and power lines kept scarring ground from horizons to horizons. I watched crossroads become villages; villages, towns; towns turn into cities; suburbs spill over hills. Wherever I landed I heard similar reports: populations were expanding, farms spreading, timber prices rising with new construction. Speedboats and four-wheel-drive vehicles carried hunters into areas previously difficult to reach, while aircraft brought every latitude and longitude within fortnight-vacation range. As a result, virgin wilderness vanished, and wild animals dwindled in numbers. Now the American eagle is verging on extinction. Even the polar bear on its ice floes has become easy game for flying sportsmen. A peninsula named Udjung Kulon holds the last two or three dozen Javan rhinoceroses. The last herd of Arabian oryx has been machine-gunned by a sheik. Blue whales have nearly been harpooned out of their oceans. Pollution ruins bays and rivers. Refuse litters beaches. Dam projects threaten Colorado canyons, Hudson valleys, every place of natural beauty that can be a reservoir for power. Obviously, the scientific progress so alluring to me is destroying qualities of greater worth. Of course, virgin wilderness had to retreat as civilization advanced. That was inevitable. But I did not consider its possible disappearance. The world seemed so large I had assumed that portions would remain in primitive state, attainable at reasonable cost in time and effort. Days spent in laboratories, factories and offices were lightened by intuitive contact with wilderness outside. Had the choice confronted me, I would not have traded nature's miracles of life for all of science's toys. Was not my earth's surface more important than increasing the speed of transport and visiting the moon and Mars? If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of 50 years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in contact with nature more than science. This is a choice an individual still can make—but no longer mankind in general. Too few natural areas remain. Both by intent and indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us. Our emphasis of science has resulted in alarming rises in world populations that demand an ever-increasing emphasis of science to improve their standards and maintain their vigor. I have been forced to the conclusion that an overemphasis of science weakens human character and upsets life's essential balance. Science breeds technology. Technology leads to infinite complication. Examples are everywhere: in the intricacy of government and in that of business corporations: in automation and labor relations; in war, diplomacy, taxation, legislation, in almost every field of modern man's routine. From the growth of cities to that of military power, from medical requirements to social-welfare benefits, when progress is plotted against time, exponential curves result with which we cannot long conform. But what action should scientific man prescribe as a result of the curves he plots? How is their direction to be changed without another breakdown and return to wildness? Suppose technologists conclude theoretically that they are destroying their own culture. Are they capable of taking effective action to prevent such destruction? The failures of previous civilizations, and the crises existing for our own, show that man has not evolved the ability to cope with limitless complication. He has not discovered how to control his sciences' parabolas. Here I believe the human intellect can learn from primitive nature, for nature was conceived in cosmic power and thrives on infinite complication. No problem has been too difficult for it to solve. From the dynamics of an atom, nature produces the tranquility of a flower, the joy of a porpoise, the intellect of man–the miracle of life. In wilderness, I sense the miracle of life, and behind it, our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. The construction of an analogue computer or a supersonic airplane is simple when compared to the mixture of space and evolutionary eons represented by a cell. In primitive rather than in civilized surroundings I grow aware of man's evolving status, as though I were suddenly released from a hypnotic state. Life itself becomes the standard of all judgement. How could I have overlooked, even momentarily, such an obvious fact?"

"I feel transported from the modern to a Mesozoic era, freed from the blindness caused by our clocked environment of time. Ages turn to seconds as I voyage back and forth. Man becomes a recent advent among Earth's contending forms, and civilization but a flash in evolutionary progress. Surrounded by wildness I become less aware of my individuality than the life stream individuals manifest: that tenuous, immortal quality probing an unknown future and trailing, unbroken, beyond the vaguest past. Thus stripped of my culture's armor, I am an animal among various others, emerged to represent my species' progress, the momentary form and outlook of mankind. Whether in Florida's Everglades, Tanzania's Serengeti, or Java's Udjung Kulon, I see animals about me as earthly experiments with life; and so I feel myself. Each of us represents a life stream attempting to survive, to take advantage of every opportunity arising. The heron lengthens its legs to wade. The lion sharpens its teeth to kill. The rhinoceros thickens its skin for protection. Man develops his intellect to gain domination of the Earth, and by comparison, the speed with which he has gained this domination is astounding–another of those exponential curves that mount like an explosion. In civilization's sky-scraping cities I feel my superiority to lower animals confirmed by man's unchallenged rule. I view other creatures with a god's aloofness; for I have intellect, and they, no more than instinct. But surrounded by wildness, representing the human life stream with diverse competing life streams close at hand, I start doubting my superiority. I am struck by the physical perfection of other species in contrast to my own, amazed at the beauty, health and balance nature has achieved through instinct's influence. I ask myself what the intellect has done to warrant its prestige. As Earth's most messy, destructive and defective animal, man's record gives him little cause for pride. Our present intellectual superiority is no guarantee of great wisdom or survival power in our genes. Anthropologists often warn that Homo sapiens may be only an overspecialized branch on the trunk of evolution."

"Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future."

"Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it."

"I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress."

"I owned the world that hour as I rode over it... free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them."

"Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquest..."

"Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization."

"Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand?"

"What kind of man would live where there is no danger? I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished by not taking a chance at all."

"Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance."

"Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization."

"Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe — one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown."

"The people of England are about finished with him. Americans are beginning to feel the same way, and the halo of hero worship around Lindbergh's head is getting pretty well tarnished."

"Air power is new to all our countries. It brings advantages to some and weakens others; it calls for readjustment everywhere. If only there were some way to measure the changing character of men, some yardstick to reapportion influence among the nations, some way to demonstrate in peace the strength of arms in war. But with all of its dimensions, its clocks, and weights, and figures, science fails us when we ask a measure for the rights of men. They cannot be judged by numbers, by distance, weight, or time; or by counting heads without a thought of what may lie within. Those intangible qualities of character, such as courage, faith, and skill, evade all systems, slip through the bars of every cage. They can be recognized, but not measured."

"The forces of Hannibal, Drake and Napoleon moved at best with the horses' gallop or the speed of wind on sail. Now, aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men. It demands adaptability to change, places a premium on quickness of thought and speed of action. Military strength has become more dynamic and less tangible. A new alignment of power has taken place, and there is no adequate peacetime measure for its effect on the influence of nations. There seems no way to agree on the rights it brings to some and takes from others."

"Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races. We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life — a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples."