"For our contemporaries the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters"

Simone Weil, writing in the terrible year of 1937:

Words with content and meaning are not murderous. If one of them occasionally becomes asscoiated with bloodshed, it is rather by chance than inevitability, and the resulting action is generally controlled and efficacious. But when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they mean nothing.

This strikes me as chillingly relevant:

[The national interest] cannot be defined as the life, liberty, and well-being of its citizens, because they are continually being adjured to sacrifice their well-being, their liberty, and their lives to the national interest. In the end, a study of modern history leads to the conclusion that the national interest of every State consists in its capacity to make war.

-- "The Power of Words"