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1 " It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse. "
― Christopher Hitchens
2 " In our spreading materialist wasteland, more and more people thirst for contemplation, including political wheel-dealers, tycoons, and military top brass, stressed out by the rigors of their professions. Are we to suppose that everyone doing deep breathing on a meditation pillow is communing with the God of Christians? Not necessarily. What unites us to God is the practice of love. If prayer, or any other religious act, is not grounded in that, it is an offense to God. "
3 " The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism. "
― Timothy J. Keller , King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus
4 " According to an original reading of the Constitution and Declaration, the intrusiveness that is an inevitable part of big government is an offense against its people. "
― A.E. Samaan
5 " I write that crime is an unlawful act of violence that can be committed by anyone, and that punishment is the consequence designed for criminals who don't have the economic means to cover it up. Throughout history, men of wealth and power have been exempt from facing the consequences of their evil deeds. Crime, therefore, can be defined as an offense committed by an individual of inferior status in society. Punishment is a consequence forced on the perpetrator of the crime only if he occupies one of the lower steps of the social ladder "
― Mahbod Seraji , Rooftops of Tehran
6 " Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. In the original and primary sense of lacks or needs, wants tend to structure our vision of government's responsibilities. The quest for security - whether economic, physical, psychological, or military - brings a sense of urgency to politics and is one of the enduring sources of passion in policy controversies. Need is probably the most fundamental political claim. Even toddlers know that need carries more weight than desire or deservingness. They learn early to counter a rejected request by pleading, " I need it." To claim need is to claim that one should be given the resources or help because they are essential. Of course, this raises the question " essential for what?" In conflicts over security, the central issues are what kind of security government should attempt to provide; what kinds of needs it should attempt to meet; and how the burdens of making security a collective responsibility should be distributed.Just as most people are all for equity and efficiency in the abstract, most people believe that society should help individuals and families when they are in dire need. But beneath this consensus is a turbulent and intense conflict over how to distinguish need from mere desire, and how to preserve a work - or - merit based system of economic distribution in the face of distribution according to need. Defining need for purposes of public programs become much an exercise like defining equity and efficiency. People try to portray their needs as being objective, and policymakers seek to portray their program criteria as objective, in order to put programs beyond political dispute. As with equity and efficiency, there are certain recurring strategies of argument that can be used to expand or contract a needs claim.In defense policy, relative need is far more important than absolute. Our sense of national security (and hence our need for weapons) depends entirely on comparison with the countries we perceive as enemies. And here Keynes is probably right: The need for weapons can only be satisfied by feeling superior to " them." Thus, it doesn't matter how many people our warheads can kill or how many cities they can destroy. What matters is what retaliatory capacity we have left after an attack by the other side, or whether our capacity to sustain an offense is greater than their capacity to destroy it. The paradox of nuclear weapons is that the more security we gain in terms of absolute capability (i.e., kill potential), the more insecure we make ourselves with respect to the consequences of nuclear explosions. We gain superiority only by producing weapons we ourselves are terrified to use. "