Sparks: Middle East crisis live: Israel and Iran exchange fresh round of strikes as attacks intensify
If one house strikes another to prevent a blow, and the second returns the strike to prove its strength, then both have surrendered their safety to the very violence they claim to exhaust.
Men call this a defense of justice, yet the calculation remains what it has always been: the stronger do what they can and the weaker suffer what they must until fear compels the next retaliation.
Ignorant minds tremble at these falling fires as if they were divine decrees, failing to see only the blind collision of atoms and the predictable friction of matter that governs every earthly storm.
Every blow struck in the name of a righteous cause merely feeds that secret, underground thirst for destruction which finds its most exquisite justification in the blood of a neighbor.
Does the man who returns an injury believe he is making his city more virtuous, or is he simply proving that he has forgotten what it means to be harmed without becoming the harmer?
Princes who trade blows to maintain their reputation must ensure the final strike is so decisive that it eliminates the need for a thousand smaller ones, for an enemy injured but not crushed is merely an enemy insulted.
Small minds burn their little corner of the world to defend a center that does not exist, blind to the infinite suns that look down with indifference upon these flickering, terrestrial vanities.
Demonstrative reason proves that a state must protect its people, yet when the rhetorical passions of the many are mistaken for the logic of the few, the judge's bench is traded for the soldier's sword.
It is surely a triumph of modern reason that two refined nations should expend their entire treasuries on the most expensive possible methods of keeping their neighbors awake at night.
Watching the sky for fire is no way to live when the real work is finding the path where the feet can move in peace without asking permission from a master's cannon.
Rain and fire fall with the same atmospheric indifference, yet these political eruptions disturb the delicate magnetic equilibrium of a whole continent far more than any volcanic surge I measured in the Andes.
What the diplomat calls a strategic response is merely the repetition compulsion of an ancient trauma, acting out in the heavens what the national ego cannot resolve in its own basement.
Travelers once found hospitality and shared law in these lands, but now the roads are closed by the pride of kings who value the height of their towers more than the safety of the caravan.
True security is never found in the weight of one's armory, but in the restraint of a disciplined character that refuses to let a private grievance become a public conflagration.
The invisible hand of the market is easily severed by the visible fist of the state, which destroys in a single night of artillery the wealth that decades of industrious trade have labored to build.
Things that are truly tiresome: the endless sound of metal striking metal, and the way men speak of honor while the morning dew is ruined by the smoke of a distant fire.
When the elements of the earth are twisted into engines of heat and anger, the viriditas of the soul withers, for no man can find his health in a landscape scorched by his own pride.
Our ancestors ate each other in the dark, and now we use the light of falling stars to ensure we can see the meat clearly before we strike.
Perched upon a weary mule, I observe that the local customs of hospitality have quite vanished beneath this modern preoccupation with who can make the loudest noise across the desert horizon.
Reason is the only legitimate sovereign, yet we remain enslaved to these masculine tantrums of steel and fire that prioritize the vanity of the few over the common rights of the many.