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?
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,_x000D_ _x000D_ The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.
Bizarre and engrossingly disturbing, Naked Lunch, finds truth in madness.
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
My father once told me that a happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story. So this is where I choose to stop. More things are still going to happen, of course, some good, some bad. Some things never get any better. When people die they stay dead. None of us knows why we love, or why we stop loving, or why everyone we love we lose.
Thus the right of nullification meant by Mr. Jefferson is the natural right, which all admit to be a remedy against insupportable oppression.
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