timeless

guess who wrote this:

"We have heard something lately about being willing to go to war for an idea. To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive, not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue; for it is as little justified to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in other respects."

sound pretty recent? think again...

these words were written by philosopher john stuart mill in 1859, in an essay entitled A Few Words on Non-Intervention, originally published in Fraser's Magazine and afterwards republished in the third volume of Dissertations and Discussions.

i got the quote from the piece in today's smh by owen harries, It pays to be prudent when it comes to morality in world politics (the article mistakenly attributes it to mills' treatise on liberty, though harries gets it right in his paper Morality and Foreign Policy).