Alfred Thayer Mahan Quotes
Organized force alone enables the quiet and the weak to go about their business and to sleep securely in their beds, safe from the violent without or within.
Mahan, Alfred Thayer. Some Neglected Aspects of War. Little, Brown, and Company, 1907, p. 43.
Nasir Khusaro Hamiduddin Abu Muin Nasir bin Khusaro bin Harith al-Qubandiyani
This article was published under the name of “A Lover Of Peace” but is generally attributed to Paine. He was publishing in Pennsylvania which had a large Quaker, pacifist population and Paine was urging them to consider being armed.
This is an excellent example of the twisted, self-fulfilling logic of the Afrikaners in justifying apartheid. Many Afrikaners were inveterate racists, and were also usually armed which was a rural tradition of their early immigration and the Zulu and Boer Wars. Those whites would cause a riot if a black was allowed into a white audience performance. That in turn would cause chaos. Therefore mixed audiences could not be allowed. It never occurred to Botha and his colleagues that the government’s responsibility was to control and restrict the white rioters and instigators. This was not unique Afrikaner thinking; the same logic prevailed throughout the American South in the Jim Crowe segregation era.
Alfred Thayer Mahan was a United States naval officer and historian, whom John Keegan called "the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century." His book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (1890) won immediate recognition, especially in Europe, and with its successor, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (1892), made him world-famous and perhaps the most influential American author of the nineteenth century.
