Dissident Veteran For Peace: Nothing Better than a Noble Failure

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Nothing Better than a Noble Failure

Cardinal Altamira (to Father Gabriel, concerning the politics over the fate of the Jesuit reductions): ... I assure you that the courts of Europe are a jungle in comparison with which your jungle here is a tidy garden.

Don Hontar (during a visit at the San Miguel mission): ... your Christian community is commercially competitive.

Cardinal Altamira: Yes, it's very prosperous. Isn't that precisely why you want to take it over?

Don Hontar: No, you should've achieved a noble failure if you wanted the approval of the state. There's nothing we like better than a noble failure.

Father Gabriel (to Father Rodrigo, on the eve of the destruction of the San Carlos mission): If might is right then love has no place in the world. It may be so but I don't have the strength to live in a world like that ...

Don Hontar (after the Portuguese massacre at, and the razing of, the San Carlos mission): You had no alternative, your Eminence. We must work in the world. The world is thus.

Cardinal Altamira: No, Señor Hontar, thus have we made the world. Thus I have made it.

Source: The Mission (1986)

Labels: film & television, Indians, quotations, religion