Defenceless Quotes
More Defenceless Quotes
The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee— "Man and Hunger: The Perspectives of History" (Speech to the World Food Congress, January 9, 1963)
Rich and great people can take care of themselves; but the poor and defenceless the men with small cottages and large families the men who must work six days every week if they are to live in anything like comfort for a week, these men want defenders; they want men to maintain their position in Parliament; they want men who will protest against any infringement of their rights.
john bright— Speech at his Durham election (July 1843), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 100.
Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms, Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize, If ever deed of honour did thee please, Guard them, and him within protect from harms.
john milton— Sonnet VIII: When the Assault was Intended to the City.
However, the Treaty of Sevres was never ratified, As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to bring the treaty into force ‘resulted in the abandonment of thousands of defenceless peoples Armenians and Greeks to the fury of their persecutors, by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished.” The Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 that included a ‘Declaration of Amnesty’ for all offences committed between 1 August 1914 and 20 November 1922.
— William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, p.22
A man who has no excuse for crime, is indeed defenceless!
Lytton— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Lady of Lyons, Act IV, scene 1.
"It is frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devored by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves."
— Georg Friedrich Daumer, quoted by Howard Williams in The Ethics of Diet
