A great Roman orator by the name of Cicero once said: Cedant Arma Togae or Let the sword give way to the toga.
In short, Let us have peace.
The man had astutely said more, namely: Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea linguae. This translates to Let arms give way to the toga, and laurels to eloquence. A more profound exegesis will also yield another, clearer, straightforward meaning: Words are more powerful than weapons.
While I do not subscribe to Cicero’s point of view, the man was a lawyer, and as such he would always seek to carry his listener’s minds, I am quite taken with his formulation.
It is, after all, closely related to my own philosophy of life, which is summed up by the Greek Pataxon me, akouson de or Strike me if you must but listen.
In the same vein, one will find 19 centuries later the expression coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who came up with The pen is mightier than the sword.
One notes how both men placed a disproportionate amount of faith in the magical power of words, likening them to weapons. But as we all know, it’s never a good thing to get high on your own supply.
Words cannot hurt anyone. We cannot say the same thing about weapons now, can we?!
Mathematically though, words seem to be more abundant than weapons. Global Language Monitor thinks the number of words in a language can be over 1,025,100. If you were to multiply this figure by the 5,000 to 7,000 languages in existence, you get around 6 billion words in the world.
Again, not as many as say ammunition but it’s safe to say there are more words than guns.
Regardless of how you position yourself vis-à-vis this premise, I will round up my argument with a quote from Stalin:
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”
Now, if this scelerate’s notion doesn’t give you pause for thought, nothing will.
‘Tis very rare one finds confirmation of one’s beliefs in the words of a mayhem specialist like Joseph Stalin.
His argument was against people being allowed Free Speech and Guns. Mine is exactly the opposite. If you do not want to end up the victim of another Stalin, you might as well retain both.
In the end, the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is there in case the 1st One is ignored. Smart people those Founding Fathers, eh.
Götterdämmerung 