> Remember Solzhenitsyn: "Oh how we burned in the camps....." Rallying cry for a subset, but devolves into intellectualist-style proverbial line-noise for the majority of people we might appeal to. It's an empty platitude like people making posts of Mencken quotes. Someone told me once that in russia, when the bolsheviks ruled, it was common for people to speak in canned phrases, platitudes, and aphorisms. This is a coping mechanism for people who *want* to do something, but can't or don't have the will to. I.e. its a virtue signal. If you're making motions but not going anywhere, in a *war* no less, than its worse than wasting time. Its self-defeating. Which is why all the people that spoke in aphorisms, regardless of "every man must be tempted to hoist the black flag" or other hard sounding quotes--its why all those people ended up in gulags. If you're prone to doing it, to those sorts of statements, ask yourself what you're avoiding doing.