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.
It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.
Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.
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