Security

• No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. We all share responsibility for each other’s security, and only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves.
  • Kofi Annan, Address at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, Independence, Missouri, USA (11 December 2006)

• Unity, peace and security will come through the recognition—intelligently assessed—of the evils which have led to the present world situation, and then through the taking of those wise, compassionate and understanding steps which will lead to the establishing of right human relations, to the substitution of cooperation for the present competitive system, and by the education of the masses in every land as to the nature of true goodwill and its hitherto unused potency.
• What at this moment appears to prevent world unity... ? The answer is not hard to find and involves all nations: nationalism, capitalism, competition, blind stupid greed.The mass of men need arousing to see that good comes to all men alike and not just to a few privileged groups, and to learn also that "hatred ceases not by hatred but that hatred ceases by love". This love is not a sentiment, but practical goodwill, expressing itself through individuals, in communities and among nations.
  • Alice Bailey in Problems Of Humanity, Chapter VI - The Problem of International Unity (1944)

• No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
  • Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge, Ch. 8 (1912)

• If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, president of Columbia University, speech to luncheon clubs, Galveston, Texas, December 8, 1949.—The New York Times, December 9, 1949, p. 23.

• I think the ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border. I think the sooner we renounce the sanctity of these many identities and try to identify ourselves with the human race the sooner we will get a better world and a safer world.
  • Mohamed ElBaradei, Breaking the Cycle, An interview in the Cairo Times (23 October 2003)

• Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
  • Helen Keller, The Open Door (1957). This quotation is often contracted into: Security is mostly a superstition... Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. or paraphrased: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

• There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.
  • Attributed to Douglas MacArthur; reported in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations (1964), p. 316; reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
  • Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, Fiat Voluntas Tua, Ch. 29 (1959)

• We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.
  • Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

• To bargain freedom for security is the devil's bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security.
  • Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty! Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century, Ch. 16 : Security, the One-Way Ticket to Slavery, p. 174 (1998)

• From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.
  • Colin Wilson in Alien Dawn, pp. 12-13 (1998)

 

 

• Everywhere, men resign themselves to the most extreme sacrifices rather than do without government and hence security, without realizing that in so doing, they misjudge their alternatives.

  Suppose that a man found his person and his means of survival incessantly menaced; wouldn't his first and constant preoccupation be to protect himself from the dangers that surround him?  This preoccupation, these efforts, this labor, would necessarily absorb the greater portion of his time, as well as the most energetic and active faculties of his intelligence.  In consequence, he could only devote insufficient and uncertain efforts, and his divided attention, to the satisfaction of his other needs.

  Even though this man might be asked to surrender a very considerable portion of his time and of his labor to someone who takes it upon himself to guarantee the peaceful possession of his person and his goods, wouldn't it be to his advantage to conclude this bargain?

  Still, it would obviously be no less in his self-interest to procure his security at the lowest price possible.

  • Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §I of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), pp. 20–21.

• [T]he production of security should, in the interests of the consumers of this intangible commodity, remain subject to the law of free competition.  …  [N]o government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity.
  • Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §II of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), pp. 22–23.

• But why should there be an exception relative to security?  What special reason is there that the production of security cannot be relegated to free competition?  Why should it be subjected to a different principle and organized according to a different system?
  • Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §II of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), p. 24.

• In the entire world, there is not a single establishment of the security industry that is not based on monopoly or on communism.  …  Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them.  Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?
  • Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §IV of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), pp. 27–28.

• Everywhere, when societies originate, we see the strongest, most warlike races seizing the exclusive government of the society.  Everywhere we see these races seizing a monopoly on security within certain more or less extensive boundaries, depending on their number and strength.

  And, this monopoly being, by its very nature, extraordinarily profitable, everywhere we see the races invested with the monopoly on security devoting themselves to bitter struggles, in order to add to the extent of their market, the number of their forced consumers, and hence the amount of their gains.

  War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.

  • Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §VI of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), pp. 34–35.

• This option the consumer retains of being able to buy security wherever he pleases brings about a constant emulation among all the producers, each producer striving to maintain or augment his clientele with the attraction of cheapness or of faster, more complete and better justice.

  If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management.  Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers.  The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another.  In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up.

  • Gustave de Molinari, tr. J. Huston McCulloch, §X of The Production of Security (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009; orig. 1849), pp. 57–59.

 

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