Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein
The View From North Central Idaho
Ramblings on explosives, guns, politics, and sex by a redneck Idaho farm boy who became a software engineer living near Seattle.
Though I’d sooner trust any group of people randomly selected from the phone book to run the government than Einstein, he got that one right.
Reading through many quotes attributed to him, he appears to have been a very conflicted man. On one hand he shows a real love for creativity, achievement, and the freedom that makes them possible, yet he also displays the contempt for Mankind and a hatred for the military that is consistent with American socialists (he understands that a military can be for conquest and enslavement, but he fails to recognize that the only way to maintain the life and freedom he loves is with a powerful military).
“You cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war” is one of the most commonly repeated quotes attributed to him, and it is of course completely wrong– the only way to prevent war is to be prepared to win any number of them at a moment’s notice.
I learned something interesting the other day from a documentary on the atomic bomb: They say you could trace the number of deaths caused by war through human history before the Bomb as a rapidly, almost exponentially increasing, number, right up to August of 1945. After that the number dropped and went flat.
I saw that same documentary. What a profound bit of information! Another thing beside the atomic bombs that probably contributes to lower death rates in recent years is the precision munitions we have available to us. We can take out a tank without taking out the building next to it.