Mutually Assured Destruction Quotes

So you're saying, we've got a, a shoggoth gap? ~ Charles Stross

Our political process appears to be a toxic dance of mutually assured destruction that takes all the citizens down with you, and that can't be right. So I've prepared a little experiment. ~ Tim Dorsey

Here's the score. Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more. ~ Sherman Alexie

Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, works only as long as it works; it does not know what to do if deterrence fails, for it envisions no defensive capabilities. A deterrent works until it is needed; then one needs defenses. ~ Jerry Pournelle

Us reaching the moon convinced Gorbachev and other leaders that the Soviet Union couldn't compete with the U.S., so they revised their agenda. But people have short memories. ~ Buzz Aldrin

At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower's instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually assured destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness.

Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world's military budget, a lot of others aren't pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn't it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you're obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? The geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he's lost all sense of national interest. ~ Mark Steyn

Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other. ~ Ellen Gilchrist

The threat of mutually assured destruction worked for the United States during the Cold War because it had proved its willingness to drop nuclear bombs on enemy cities at the end of World War II. It might work less well for Israel, because the Israeli Air Force has never deliberately targeted a large civilian population center, and its leaders have said its morality would not permit it do so. ~ Alan Dershowitz

The division into hundreds of countries whose borders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic disease and who knows what else, and flourish beyond the twenty-first century. The very fact that the preceding sentence sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence. ~ Brian Cox

If I wanted to bring you down, David, I could've done that months ago." "If I wanted you dead, Agent Hassler - you and everyone you love - there is nothing in the world stopping me from making that happen. Not from prison. Not from the grave." "So we've established trust," Hassler said. "Perhaps. Or at the very least, assured mutual destruction." "No difference in my book. ~ Blake Crouch

If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature - and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine - fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely,it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defence makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support,the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine. ~ Adolf Hitler

after doing a good deed, assured me that all the credit belonged to me and that those many people who nowadays taught and preached that the individual good deed was of no significance were wrong. I was also very anxious to talk for a while. '"Whoever attacks individual 'charity'," I began, "attacks the nature of man and despises his personal dignity. But the organization of 'public charity' and the question of personal freedom are two different questions and are not mutually exclusive. Individual kindness will always remain, because it is a need of the personality, a living need for the direct influence of one personality on another. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And the connections we have progressively built between human societies not only link old germ pools, but more profoundly they have turned separate groups into a metapopulation for roving killers to explore. The main drama of disease history has been the constant emergence of untried germs from wild hosts, finding human groups linked in ever-larger pacts of mutually assured infection. ~ Kyle Harper

What would love be without mutually assured oblivion? ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions. ~ Rene Descartes

The Author of nature has not given laws to the universe, which, like the institutions of men, carry in themselves the elements of their own destruction; he has not permitted in his works any symptom of infancy or of old age, or any sign by which we may estimate either their future or their past duration. He may put an end, as he no doubt gave a beginning, to the present system at some determinate period of time; but we may rest assured, that this great catastrophe will not be brought about by the laws now existing, and that it is not indicated by any thing which we perceive. ~ John Playfair

Legitimacy will come at the end of time, when the kingdom of men is assured. "The affair has only just
begun, it is far from being terminated, and the world has many other things to suffer, but we shall achieve
our aim, we shall be Caesar, and then we shall begin to think about universal happiness."
By then the prisoner has been executed; the Grand Inquisitors reign alone, listening to "the profound
spirit, the spirit of destruction and death." The Grand Inquisitors proudly refuse freedom and the bread of
heaven and offer the bread of this earth without freedom. "Come down from the cross and we will believe
in you," their police agents are already crying on Golgotha. But He did not come down and, even, at the
most tortured moment of His agony, He protested to God at having been forsaken. There are, thus, no
longer any proofs, but faith and the mystery that the rebels reject and at which the Grand Inquisitors scoff.
Everything is permitted and centuries of crime are prepared in that cataclysmic moment. From Paul to
Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise
popes. The unity of the world, which was not achieved with God, will henceforth be attempted in defiance
of God. ~ Albert Camus

You think of me that way because you look at me and at what I do through the lens of your mundane understanding of the world. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, nation identity, any of a dozen more irrelevant markers, To mundanes they seem logical, for though mundanes connote see, understand, or acknowledge the demon worlds, still somewhere found buried in their ancient memories, they know that there are those that walk this earth and are other. That do not belong, that mean only harm and destruction. Since the demon threat is invisible to mundanes, they must assign the threat to others of their own kind. They place the face of their enemy onto the face of their neighbor, and thus are generations of misery assured. ~ Cassandra Clare

This development had dramatic philosophical consequences. As in the case of the non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, there wasn't just one definitive set theory, but rather at least four! One could make different assumptions about infinite sets and end up with mutually exclusive set theories. For instance, once could assume that both the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis hold true and obtain one version, or that both do not hold, and obtain an entirely different theory. Similarly, assuming the validity of one of the two axioms and the negation of the other would have led to yet two other set theories.

This was the non-Euclidean crisis revisited, only worse. The fundamental role of set theory as the potential basis for the whole of mathematics made the problem for the Platonists much more acute. If indeed one could formulate many set theories simply by choosing a different collection of axioms, didn't this argue for mathematics being nothing but a human invention? The formalists' victory looked virtually assured. ~ Mario Livio

Judge Roberts has assured me personally that he has a healthy respect for precedent and the hard-won rights of Americans. ~ Max Baucus

Whatever is goode in its kinde ought to be preserv'd in respect for antiquity, as well as our present advantage, for destruction can be profitable to none but such as live by it. ~ Nicholas Hawksmoor

Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcilable. Their origins and their ends make them mutually exclusive. Their co-existence in our midst constantly raises insoluble problems, and the strife thereby engendered constitutes a persistent danger for every one of our social safeguards. ~ Denis De Rougemont

If we were created from the very fiber of our birth parents' physical and emotional beings, don't you think our need to think about them would be innate? If we had primal conversations with our mother in the womb, wouldn't you say it is natural for us to think about her as we are growing up and growing old? And if our birth father's DNA helped determine the color of our hair and eyes, wouldn't you say that he is just as much a part of us as our mother and it is normal to want a relationship with him? Wherever we are in the spectrum of perceptions about our birth parents, we must rest assured that our thoughts are normal and healthy. They are part of the fiber of our being. Part of the package of being adopted. It is all about our identity ... our dual identity. ~ Sherrie Eldridge

After he and this girl split up in Paris, Roger was on the town; really on the town. He joked about it and made fun of himself; but he was very angry inside for having made such a profound fool of himself and he took his talent for being faithful to people, which was the best one he had, next to the ones for painting and writing and his various good human and animal traits, and beat and belaboured that talent miserably. He was no good to anyone when he was on the town, especially to himself, and he knew it and hated it and he took pleasure in pulling down the pillars of the temple. It was a very good and strongly built temple and when it is constructed inside yourself it is not so easy to pull down. But he did as good a job as he could. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of. ~ Oscar Wilde

What chance of survival does a culture have
when its own elites actively seek its destruction? ~ William S Lind

Indeed there are many competent people who are plagued by a sense of inefficacy, and many less competent ones who remain unperturbed by impending threats because they are self-assured of their coping capabilities ~ Albert Bandura

The surest source of destruction to men is to obey themselves. ~ John Calvin

Destruction is only another aspect of being. ~ Angela Carter

Bombs take hours or days to reach every corner of the earth. Words arrive instantly and kill more people. They are a weapon of mass destruction. ~ Haim Harari

These were kids for whom simple self-destruction wasn't enough. ~ Chuck Hogan

Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they will do everything in their to power to rid themselves of their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the suppression of another, perhaps the majority---and this is the case in all modern cultures,---it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so lar ~ Sigmund Freud

A reduction in meat consumption is the most powerful single act that you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources. ~ John Robbins

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. ~ George W. Bush

It is so heartbreaking what we do to children in this world; how they are destroyed. ~ Bryant McGill

I've long subscribed to the notion that technology is advancing much faster than our ability to understand its implications. ~ Ken Goldstein