The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

 

The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
--
Chapter 4

 

Ursula K. Le Guin

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There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

 

Ayn Rand

 

But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder. Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act. And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act,—at least in theory.

 

Benjamin Tucker

 

Now, please don't misunderstand me. When I point out that all our wars for a thousand years have been fought in other people's countries, I do not mean that any of these wars was necessarily aggressive. They may well have been, everyone of them, defensive. But plainly they were not defensive of soil, territory. Of what then were they defensive? They were defensive of the nation's interests, rights; interests which may well collide with the interests of other nations in any part of the world ... Nations do so differ as to what their respective rights are and differ sincerely. And often the question, which of the two is right, is extremely difficult, as anyone who has attempted to disentangle rival territorial claims in the Balkans or elsewhere knows only too well.

 

Norman Angell

 

We consider the capacity of the Syrian defensive forces as our own and believe that expansion of defensive ties would ... help deal with threats of the enemies.

 

Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar

 

The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.

 

Erich Fromm