Talk:Military

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Merger of Stephen Benjamin quotes

Quotes from the deleted article Stephen Benjamin were merged into this article under "Homosexuality and the military". The edit history of that article was:

• (cur) (last) 00:41, 1 December 2007 (UTC) BD2412 (Talk | contribs | block) (1,107 bytes) ({{vfd-new}}) (rollback | undo)
• (cur) (last) 23:38, 30 November 2007 (UTC) Poetlister (Talk | contribs | block) (1,094 bytes) (Prod refused - quote in two major papers is evidence of notability) (undo)
• (cur) (last) 22:33, 21 November 2007 (UTC) BD2412 (Talk | contribs | block) m (1,364 bytes) (fix prod) (undo)
• (cur) (last) 22:28, 21 November 2007 (UTC) BD2412 (Talk | contribs | block) m (1,361 bytes) (No evidence that the subject is notable.) (undo)
• (cur) (last) 22:27, 21 November 2007 (UTC) BD2412 (Talk | contribs | block) (1,333 bytes) ({{prod}} - non-notable) (undo)
• (cur) (last) 20:51, 21 November 2007 (UTC) Ubiquity (Talk | contribs | block) m (1,094 bytes) (reformat, removed WP redlink) (undo)
• (cur) (last) 19:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC) 66.255.56.240 (Talk | block) (1,014 bytes) (undo)
• (cur) (last) 19:36, 21 November 2007 (UTC) 66.255.56.240 (Talk | block) (914 bytes) (New page: Stephen Benjamin is a former Petty Officer Second Class in the U.S. Navy and Arabic translator. == Sourced == * "'Don’t ask, don’t tell' does nothing bu...)

Please see Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Stephen Benjamin for the discussion. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 08:44, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion

I suggest to add this quote from Michael Billig : "All Societies that maintain armies maintain the beleief that some things are more valuable than life itself. Just What is so valued varies." (first sentence in the introduction of Banal Nationalism). What do you think ? Xic667 16:05, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

You need not ask, you can simply add this yourself. That is one of the problems I believe has grown here, and elsewhere, when it is clear that too many people have become to hesitant or reluctant to add things, because there are regular promotions of artificial criteria by people who wish to remove and control things. Healthy wikis are ideally "organized anarchies" — don't let any authoritarians convince you otherwise. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 16:11, 26 November 2011 (UTC) + tweak

This has now been added in the form

• All Societies that maintain armies maintain the belief that some things are more valuable than life itself. Just What is so valued varies.
  • Michael Billig, in Banal Nationalism (1995) Introduction

It also is quoted in that form in Fanatics! : Power, Identity, and Fandom in Football (1998) by Adam Brown, p. 158; but I mention this simply because it was the means by which I just confirmed that it was quoted correctly above. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 16:24, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for adding my suggestion. Xic667 (talk) 14:15, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Dubious Kissinger quote

Kissinger almost certainly never said that military men were "dumb stupid animals to be used" as pawns of foreign policy.

The only evidence that he ever said such a thing was a claim by Woodward & Bernstein (who absolutely hated Kissinger), that another of Kissinger's political foes, Alexander Haig, had told someone unnamed, that Kissinger had said it. That's triple hearsay, made even weaker by the fact that one of the whisperers is anonymous. It has been substantiated by neither Kissinger nor Haig, nor by anyone of known identity who claimed to have heard it. As Kirkus Reviews noted about the whole book, "none of it is substantiated in any assessable way."

It's really not even plausible. Kissinger has always been very respectful of servicemen and their sacrifices. For him to have said such a thing would have been wildly out of character. In fact, the awkward phrasing doesn't even sound like Kissinger, whose prose is consistently elegant, despite his distinct accent, even when he speaks extemporaneously. NCdave (talk) 04:27, 31 December 2015 (UTC)