war, like torture, is...a structure through which the attributes of th — Elaine Scarry

"Like the coatmaker, the poet is working not to make the artifact (which is just the midpoint in the total action), but to remake human sentience; by means of the poem, he or she enters into and in some way alters the alive percipience of other persons...In the attempt to understand making, attention cannot stop at the object (the coat, the poem), for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers. (Chapter 5)"

"One of the things that has seduced people into giving up on their own actions is the claim of emergency—the government will often make the spurious claim that because certain things require very fast action, there is no time for ordinary processes of deliberation and thinking, and therefore we have to abridge our normal protocols. I find exactly the opposite to be the case. Thinking and emergency action are deeply compatible. Sometimes that thinking takes the form of very recognizable deliberative processes, and many other times that thinking takes a form that may be less easy to recognize—protocols, procedures, laws that we deliberate about in advance, and we build all the deliberation into the protocols, and then that allows us to act very quickly."

"the result of prior preparation for emergency is that it allows some space in your mind for thinking. You’re not trying to invent everything on the spot; you may have to invent one thing on the spot, but nine of the ten things you have to do you’ve already rehearsed mentally. And so yes, I think you’re exactly right, that calmness is something that would accompany a society that has practiced."

"we sometimes refer to a 9/11 moment as though that feeling of camaraderie is unusual, but actually that feeling of camaraderie would be the norm if, for example, we followed the Constitutional rules about war-making. We’ve allowed the Executive to do everything. If we restore to the population both the responsibility and the obligation to oversee our entry into war, then there would be this sense of esprit and responsibility, and we would have the power to put a brake on war. It might also be that the population would agree to go to war, if there were really strong arguments, but the way it is now, the whole war-making machinery is decoupled from the larger population, making its consent or dissent irrelevant. There’s a reason why we’ve allowed the population to be excluded from the military, and that is because joining the military and ever having to go to war are so aversive and so much against the grain of civilized behavior."