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To: Perdogg; EveningStar; Aevery_Freeman; ShadowAce; Jack Hydrazine; Altariel; nuancey; ...
Re: Starship Troopers: One of the Most Misunderstood Movies Ever

Well, then let us have the novel speak for itself:

“Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.”

“Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part...and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms”

“To permit irresponsible authority is to sell disaster.”

“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”

“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.”

Cast me into a dungeon;, burn me at the state, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives — but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”

“If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?”

“Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination— devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues — which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out.”

“The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive—and nowhere else!—and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . . . .
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual.”

“Our behavior is different. How often have you seen a headline like this?—TWO DIE ATTEMPTING RESCUE OF DROWNING CHILD. If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost just as many volunteers turn out.
Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature—a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price.”

“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”

“There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.”

“If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?”

“Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful.”

Gadzooks! Need Bob Heinlein... say more?

110 posted on 11/09/2013 7:08:14 PM PST by Bender2 ("I've got a twisted sense of humor, and everything amuses me." RAH Beyond this Horizon)
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To: Bender2
That gets a rare dual-approval by both the Captain, and the Chief Medical Officer:


113 posted on 11/09/2013 7:40:50 PM PST by Old Sarge (And Good Evening, Agent Smith, wherever you are...)
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To: Bender2

http://laurenoutloud.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/bestie_beer_bender-homer.jpg

116 posted on 11/09/2013 8:19:33 PM PST by big'ol_freeper ("Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid" ~ Ronald Wilson Reagan)
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To: Bender2

Great book!

Did anyone ever read his “Fifth Column?” (I think that’s what it was called). I thought that one was pretty cool and ripe for a movie.


125 posted on 11/10/2013 6:48:13 AM PST by Thorliveshere (Minnesota Survivor)
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