Elizabeth Samet Quotes
-
Our national fondness for celebrating the physical heroism of soldiers - the apparent readiness with which they sacrifice their lives to larger causes - eclipses the far less romantic displays of moral and intellectual fortitude that also distinguish so many of them. In turning them all into heroes, we have lost a sense of the individuality they also fight to preserve.
-
We surrendered rather easily to yet another romantic notion: that meaning is to be found only in misery.
-
The allure of military life and its heroic promise seem indestructible, but nothing threatens the romance of war more effectively than war itself.
-
Courage isn't simply a matter of leading charges: sometimes it consists in speaking up, sometimes in stoic silence, sometimes in forging ahead, sometimes in circumspection, and sometimes in nothing less than preserving our own humanity.
-
The notion that obedience dehumanizes those who render it is a popular cry of the philosophers of radical individualism, such as Thoreau, who are so important to America's myth of itself.