Quote by Harold C. Goddard

“The delibarate placing of the highest intellectual gifs and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is esential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.”

Quote by Harold C. Goddard