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1 " They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king. "
― Bob Dylan
2 " A prince ... is only the first servant of the state, who is obliged to act with probity and prudence. ... As the sovereign is properly the head of a family of citizens, the father of his people, he ought on all occasions to be the last refuge of the unfortunate. "
― Frederick the Great
3 " My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one's power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego. "
― , Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence
4 " We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal. "
― Umberto Eco
5 " Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty. "
― Oscar Wilde
6 " In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval....Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law.Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition. "
7 " Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. "
― Isaac Asimov , Foundation (Foundation, #1)
8 " I have always felt,” he said, “that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats "
― Neil Gaiman , Neverwhere (London Below, #1)
9 " Dams also tend to be built in remote areas which are the last refuge for species that have been displaced by development in other regions. "
― , Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams: Enlarged and Updated Edition
10 " Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt. "
― Martha Wells , City of Bones
11 " I wish you'd stop desperately trying to get my attention like this," he said. " It's become embarrassing." " Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt," she told him." I can't help it. I use my rapier wit to hide my inner pain. "
12 " I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, " If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." . . . Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel. "
13 " I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. "
14 " Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light. "
― Ellen Meloy , Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
15 " How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action...You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. "
― Neil Postman , Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
16 " Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. "
17 " Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. "
― Samuel Johnson
18 " A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , The Painted Veil
19 " Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble-making individual. "
20 " Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. "
― Nick Hornby , A Long Way Down