Quotes about safety

“I think you serve a great purpose, Hawkmoon. I think your destiny is a noble one.”

Hawkmoon laughed. “And yet I do not pine for a noble destiny—merely a secure one.”

“I have heard it said it is often safer to dwell in the lion’s lair than outside it,” Oladahn said.

“Safer still to live in a land where there are no lions,” Count Brass retorted.

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.

Everywhere you look — Britain, the States, western Europe — people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake — a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.

The office of the sovereign, be it a monarch or an assembly, consisteth in the end for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people, to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of that law, and to none but Him. But by safety here is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself.

And this is intended should be done, not by care applied to individuals, further than their protection from injuries when they shall complain; but by a general providence, contained in public instruction, both of doctrine and example; and in the making and executing of good laws to which individual persons may apply their own cases.

Marriage is about banality. Its purpose is banality, to create an environment of surpassing safety and predictability for young children to grow up in, the foundation of life, the root of inner peace.

When will the Israelis realize—as some already have—that a sustained racist brutality against Arabs, in a Middle East where Israel is surrounded by 300 million Arabs and 1.2 billion Muslims, will bring the Jewish state neither normalcy nor security?

It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.

“Hasn’t all this taught you anything?” Annette asked Gabriel Baines as they waited for the simulacrum's return and report.

“Like what?”

“That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living.

There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.