Quotes About Sacrifice

Doesn't matter," Maren said. "As long as the wolf enters the pen, who cares if it happens to eat the sheep?" Mac shook his head. "You can bet your ass the sheep cares.

War doesn't determine who's right, only who's left. And that had not been him.

War doesn't determine who's right, only who's left.

A glory that costs everything and means nothing.

Everything that's truly irrevocable finally has to do with love or freedom, but whether you act in the name of the first or the second, one of them ultimately bows to the other and that's the most irrevocable thing of all.

When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice their plastic shopping bags, their air-conditioning, their extraneous travel, the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay.

Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn't like the idea of quitting.

if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale's head for an afternoon.

It's why action and adventure athletes routinely risk life and limb for their sports and why spiritual ascetics willingly trade creature comforts for a chance to glimpse God.

Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.

in the West today public places are no longer named after military victories. Our war memorials depict not proud commanders on horseback but weeping mothers, weary soldiers, or exhaustive lists of names of the dead.

We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.

From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali.

Ever-creative Homo sapiens had long fought back against disease with quackery such as prayer, sacrifice, bloodletting, cupping, toxic metals, homeopathy, and squeezing a hen to death against an infected body part.

by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.

You might have to spread-eagle while a guard slides a wand up your crotch, you may have an elbow in your ribs and a seatback in your chin, but long-distance lovers get to see each other, and if your mother gets sick you can be there the next day.

It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel industry.

Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness.

Though truth-telling sheds no blood, it requires a painful emotional sacrifice on the part of the confessors in the form of shame, guilt, and a unilateral disarmament of their chief moral weapon, the claim to innocence.

Human sacrifice and witch-burnings are just two examples of the harm that can result from people pursuing ends that involve figments of their imagination.

one can imagine a leader who has a changing willingness to suffer a cost over time, increasing as the conflict proceeds and his resolve toughens. His motto would be: "We fight on so that our boys shall not have died in vain." This mindset, known as loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.

When a "nation" is conceived as a tacit social contract among people sharing a territory, like a condominium association, it is an essential means for advancing its members' flourishing. And of course it is genuinely admirable for one individual to sacrifice his or her interests for those of many individuals.

people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.