If only I had a thousand rifles of the same calibre!

 

If only I had a thousand rifles of the same calibre!
--
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (1961) Mission for my Country, London, page 41
--
Prior to his seizure of power, Persia's stocks of firearms were unstandardized and unreliable

 

Reza Shah Pahlavi

» Reza Shah Pahlavi - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

For my part I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes.

 

Benito Mussolini

 

I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp's rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

 

Henry David Thoreau

 

A single Voltaire will do more honor to France than a thousand pedants, a thousand false wits, a thousand great men of inferior order.

 

Frederick II of Prussia

 

Andriy is our locomotive. We don't have players of the calibre of Kaka, Cafu and Maldini to play alongside him, but he carries the team up.

 

Andriy Shevchenko

 

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernal, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly smail portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

 

Mark Twain