Catherine Helen Spence Quotes

War is not popular politically because there is always a cost—a cost in people and a cost in money.

We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

On top of that, illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion a year. And this is what we get. For the money we are going to spend on illegal immigration over the next 10 years, we could provide 1 million at-risk students with a school voucher, which so many people are wanting.

The most intense hatreds are not between political parties but within them.

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.

Life in its highest state is understanding.

We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

Within one's own family money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything. There are all kinds of other things that we are not supposed to sell - political influence being one of them. We too rarely have public conversations about the common sense of money. We too rarely talk about the human cost of putting some of these economic measures into effect.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

In the end it's the big picture which changes nations and whatever our opponents may say, Australia's changed inexorably for good, for the better.

Philosophy should always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery.

Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.

All appointments hurt. Five friends are made cold or hostile for every appointment; no new friends are made. All patronage is perilous to men of real ability or merit. It aids only those who lack other claims to public support.

Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

The cost of war impacts all of us - both in the human cost and the cost that's being felt frankly in places like Flint, Michigan, where families and children are devastated and destroyed by completely failed infrastructure because of lack of investment.

Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted.

Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, "All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

What you do, what each of us does, has an effect on the country, the state, the nation, and the world.

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process.

Iraq and Afghanistan have exacted a toll on America - in lives, treasure and standing - that it will take a generation to work through.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.