I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human.
Interpretation
Grotius critiques the moral decay of warfare in the Christian world, highlighting the lack of justifications for conflict.
In this quote, Hugo Grotius laments the state of the Christian world where wars are initiated on trivial grounds, reflecting a profound moral failure. He points out that even the most primitive societies would be ashamed of such indiscriminate violence, which occurs without adherence to either divine or human law, suggesting a deep philosophical reflection on the nature of justice and morality in human conflict.
In practice
In a speech at a peace conference, one might use this quote to emphasize the need for just causes in warfare.
A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason
By undertaking many things, I have accomplished nothing.
Men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and once taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human.
I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.
On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.
Water, stories, the body, all the things we do, are mediums that hid and show what's hidden.
The right to bear arms? What about the right to live?
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