Reflections on War and Death quotes

It would seem as though no event had ever destroyed so much of the precious heritage of mankind, confused so many of the clearest intellects or so thoroughly debased what is highest.

Even science has lost her dispassionate impartiality.

Her deeply embittered votaries are intent upon seizing her weapons to do their share in the battle against the enemy. The anthropologist has to declare his opponent inferior and degenerate, the psychiatrist must diagnose him as mentally deranged.

Nevertheless several things might be said in criticism of his disappointment. Strictly speaking it is not justified, for it consists in the destruction of an illusion.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

What we call the character of a person does not really emerge until the fate of all these impulses has been settled, and character, as we all know, is very inadequately defined in terms of either "good" or "evil."

Man is seldom entirely good or evil, he is "good" on the whole in one respect and "evil" in another, or "good" under certain conditions, and decidedly "evil" under others.

It is interesting to learn that the earlier infantile existence of intense "bad" impulses is often the necessary condition of being "good" in later life. The most pronounced childish egotists may become the most helpful and self-sacrificing citizens;

These discussions have already afforded us the consolation that our mortification and painful disappointment on account of the uncivilized behavior of our fellow world citizens in this war were not justified. They rested upon an illusion to which we had succumbed.

In reality they have not sunk as deeply as we feared because they never really rose as high as we had believed.

The fact that states and races abolished their mutual ethical restrictions not unnaturally incited them to withdraw for a time from the existing pressure of civilization and to sanction a passing gratification of their suppressed impulses.

We have shown an unmistakable tendency to put death aside, to eliminate it from life. We attempted to hush it up, in fact, we have the proverb: to think of something as of death. Of course we meant our own death.

We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators.

The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.

we act as if we were justified in singing his praises at the funeral oration, and inscribe only what is to his advantage on the tombstone.

This consideration for the dead, which he really no longer needs, is more important to us than the truth and to most of us, certainly, it is more important than consideration for the living.

This conventional attitude of civilized people towards death is made still more striking by our complete collapse at the death of a person closely related to us, such as a parent, a wife or husband, a brother or sister, a child or a dear friend.

But this attitude of ours towards death exerts a powerful influence upon our lives. Life becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked.

It becomes as hollow and empty as an American flirtation in which it is understood from the beginning that nothing is to happen, in contrast to a continental love affair in which both partners must always bear in mind the serious consequences.

Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court dangers for ourselves and those belonging to us.

But this attitude of ours towards death exerts a powerful influence upon our lives.

Life becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked.

It becomes as hollow and empty as an American flirtation in which it is understood from the beginning that nothing is to happen, in contrast to a continental love affair in which both partners must always bear in mind the serious consequences.

It is really too sad that it may happen in life as in chess, where a false move can force us to lose the game, but with this difference, that we cannot begin a return match.

In the realm of fiction we find the many lives in one for which we crave.

We die in identification with a certain hero and yet we outlive him and, quite unharmed, are prepared to die again with the next hero.

It is no longer an accident. Of course, it still seems accidental whether a particular bullet strikes this man or that but the survivor may easily be struck down by a second bullet, and the accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident.

Life has indeed become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance.

Let us make a division here and separate those who risk their lives in battle from those who remain at home, where they can only expect to lose one of their loved ones through injury, illness, or infection.

Such a powerful inhibition can only be directed against an equally strong impulse. What no human being desires to do does not have to be forbidden, it is self-exclusive.

The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.

The ethical strivings of mankind, with the strength and significance of which we need not quarrel, are an acquisition of the history of man; they have since become, though unfortunately in very variable quantities, the hereditary possessions of people of today.

Our unconscious does not carry out the killing, it only thinks and wishes it. But it would be wrong to underestimate the psychic reality so completely in comparison to the practical reality. It is really important and full of serious consequences.

In our unconscious we daily and hourly do away with all those who stand in our way, all those who have insulted or harmed us.

The expression: "The devil take him," which so frequently crosses our lips in the form of an ill-humored jest, but by which we really intend to say, "Death take him," is a serious and forceful death wish in our unconscious.

like the old Athenian law of Draco, it knows no other punishment for crime than death, and this not without a certain consistency, for every injury done to our all-mighty and self-glorifying self is at bottom a crimen laesae majestatis.

Thus, if we are to be judged by our unconscious wishes, we ourselves are nothing but a band of murderers, just like primitive man.

It is lucky that all wishes do not possess the power which people of primitive times attributed to them.[5] For in the cross fire of mutual maledictions mankind would have perished long ago, not excepting the best and wisest of men as well as the …

There are also a number of cynical jokes and anecdotes which bear witness to the same effect, such as the remark attributed to the husband: "If one of us dies I shall move to Paris."

Such cynical jokes would not be possible if they did not have an unavowed truth to reveal which we cannot admit when it is baldly and seriously stated.

It is well known that one may even speak the truth in jest.

"If one of us dies I shall move to Paris." Such cynical jokes would not be possible if they did not have an unavowed truth to reveal which we cannot admit when it is baldly and seriously stated.

It is well known that one may even speak the truth in jest.

A case arises for our consciousness, just as it did for primitive man, in which the two opposite attitudes towards death, one of which acknowledges it as the destroyer of life, while the other denies the reality of death, clash and come into conflict.

This may not appear a very high achievement and in some respects rather a step backwards, a kind of regression, but at least it has the advantage of taking the truth into account a little more and of making life more bearable again.

To bear life remains, after all, the first duty of the living.

The illusion becomes worthless if it disturbs us in this.

It is easy to see how war enters into this disunity.

War strips off the later deposits of civilization and allows the primitive man in us to reappear.

It forces us again to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death, it stamps all strangers as enemies whose death we ought to cause or wish; it counsels us to rise above the death of those whom we love.

Si vis vitam, para mortem.

If you wish life, prepare for death.