Some people did not like this ceremonious style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
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Churchill ended his December 8, 1941 letter to the Japanese Ambassador, declaring that a state of war now existed between the United Kingdom and Japan, with the courtly flourish "I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your obedient servant".
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The Second World War, Volume III : The Grand Alliance (1950) Chapter 32 (Pearl Harbor)Winston Churchill
» Winston Churchill - all quotes »
I can’t tell you. I would say that if I did, I would have to kill you, but that wouldn’t be polite.
Sanjaya Malakar
Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
James Mattis
The chief trouble with the official style is that it spreads far beyond the formal contexts to which it is suited. Most civil servants, having learned to write in this way, cannot throw off the habit. The obscurity of their public announcements largely accounts for the disrepute into which Departmental activities have fallen: for the public naturally supposes that Departments are as muddled and stodgy as their announcements.
The habit of obscurity is partly caused by a settled disinclination among public servants to give a definite refusal even where assent is out of the question; or to convey a vigorous rebuke even where, in private correspondence, any person with self-respect would feel bound to do so. The mood is conveyed by a polite and emasculated style — polite because, when writing to a member of the public, the public servant is, in theory at least, addressing one of his collective employers; emasculated because, as a cog in the Government machine, he must make his phrases look as mechanical as possible by stripping them of all personal feeling and opinion.Robert Graves
(on people who join the military) As long as the people who kinda wanna go kill other people are going to go kill other people who kinda wanna go kill other people, you're killing all the right people and opening up all the best parking spaces.
Doug Stanhope
Mills: Even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence, did they think that was wise? Was that a wise reasoned action?
Souljah: Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?… White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, are above and beyond dying, when they would kill their own kind?Sister Souljah
Churchill, Winston
Churchland, Patricia
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