“Politics is the womb in which war develops.” ——Carl P. G. von Clausewitz
“A rational army would run away.” ——Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu
“The voice of protest…is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum…is bidding all men…obey in silence the tyrannous word of command.” ——Charles Eliot Norton
“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.” ——Charles-Louis De Secondat
“Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat–including men–from reluctant citizens…” ——Charles Tilly
“Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.” ——Charles V of France
“The politicians in this world…have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes.” ——Charley Reese
“War, n: A time-tested political tactic guaranteed to raise a president’s popularity rating by at least 30 points. It is especially useful during election years and economic downturns.” ——Chaz Bufe
“War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.” ——Chris Hedges
“The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.” ——Chris Hedges
“In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence.” ——Chris Hedges
“After victory, you have more enemies.” ——Cicero
“True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.” ——Clarence Darrow
“Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant.” ——C. L. Montague
“War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.” ——Colin Powell
“Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism…which equates the national honor with military victory.” ——Colonel James A. Donovan, Marine Corps
“You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.” ——Condoleezza Rice
“War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.” ——Congressman Ron Paul
“As a rule of thumb, if the government wants you to know it, it probably isn’t true.” ——Craig Murray
“Peace will be realized only by forging bonds of trust between people at the deepest level, in the depths of their very lives.” ——Daisaku Ikeda
“All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons.” ——Dalai Lama
“When the largest industry in the world is no longer War, I will accept Darwin’s theory of Evolution.” ——Dale S. Mugford
“Today the real test of America’s power and wisdom is not our capacity to make war but our capacity to prevent it.” ——Dale Turner
“Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.” ——Daniel Goleman
“There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong.” ——Daniel O’Connell
“Tis nobler to lose honor to save the lives of men than it is to gain honor by taking them.” ——David Borenstein
“You cannot win a War on Terrorism. It’s like having a war on jealousy.” ——David Cross
“The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny…” ——David Hume
“You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon.” ——David Lloyd
“Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.” ——Davy Crockett
“From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.” ——Denis Diderot
“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” ——Donald Rumsfeld
“There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.” ——Donald Rumsfeld
“Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.” ——Dorothy Thompson
“The best defense is no offense.” ——Dr. Ivan Eland
“‘Rules of engagement’ are a set of guidelines for murder.” ——Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
“Conflict cannot survive without your participation.” ——Dr. Wayne Dyer
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.” ——Duke of Wellington
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“This world of ours…must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.” ——Dwight D. Eisenhower
“The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.” ——E. B. White
“Wisdom is better than weapons of war.” ——Ecclesiastes 9:18, The Bible
“I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.” ——Edmund Burke
“Tyrants seldom want pretexts.” ——Edmund Burke
“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” ——Edward Abbey
“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other–instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.” ——Edward Abbey
“Our ‘neoconservatives’ are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.” ——Edward Abbey
“Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.” ——Edward Everett
“As long as mankind shall bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst for military glory will remain the vice of the most exalted characters.” ——Edward Gibbon
“Violence is an admission that one’s ideas and goals cannot prevail on their own merits.” ——Edward M. Kennedy
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.” ——Edward R. Murrow
“All the gods are dead except the god of war.” ——Eldridge Cleaver
“All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.” ——Eleanor Roosevelt
“It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” ——Eleanor Roosevelt
“Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.” ——Elias Canetti
“My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.” ——Ella Baker
“Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.” ——E. M. Forster
“History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.” ——Enoch Powell
“The first casualty of war is not truth, but perspective. Once that’s gone, truth, like compassion, reason, and all the other virtues, wanders around like a wounded orphan.” ——Ente Grillenhaft
“War is the blackest villainy of which human nature is capable.” ——Erasmus
“Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is delightful to the inexperienced).” ——Erasmus, the 16th-century scholar
“History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse.” ——Eric Alterman
“A hospital alone shows what war is.” ——Erich Maria Remarque
“You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.” ——Ernest Hemingway
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.” ——Ernest Hemingway
“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.” ——Ernest Hemingway
“The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin.” ——Ernest Hemingway
“For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.” ——Ernie Pyle
“No war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.” ——Eugene Debs
“God hates violence. He has ordained that all men fairly possess their property, not seize it.” ——Euripides
“Wars should be over in three days or less…and the American people must be all for it from the outset.” ——Evan Thomas
“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.” ——F. A. Hayek
“We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us.” ——Francis John McConnell
“The State acquires power…and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.” ——Frank Chodorov
“All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.” ——Frank Chodorov
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.” ——Frank Herbert
“It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible.” ——Frank Herbert
“The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.” ——Frank Kent
“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” ——Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.” ——Frederick Douglass
“Wars are the hobbies of half-informed children who have somehow come into possession of the levers of power.” ——Fred Reed
“When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” ——Frédéric Bastiat
“Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.” ——Friedrich Hebbel, German poet and dramatist
“Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.” ——Friedrich Nietzsche
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” ——Friedrich Nietzsche
“If, finally, violence meets with violence, we have confirmation of the age old adage that war though it kills many men, makes many more men evil.” ——Fritz Medicus
“War is a tool of the rich that sucks blood and money from the poor on both sides.” ——Gary Amirault
“What makes a mother pour her very life into a child; take it to Sunday school to learn how to overcome enemies with love (Matt. 5:38-48) and then hands it over to a recruiter who brainwashes it to kill anyone on command? Mothers, end this insanity!” ——Gary Amirault
“I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world.” ——General Colin Powell
“In war, as it is waged now, with the enormous losses on both sides, both sides will lose. It is a form of mutual suicide.” ——General Douglas MacArthur
“I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations.” ——General Douglas MacArthur
“As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.” ——General Omar Bradley
“War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.” ——General Omar N. Bradley
“There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.” ——General Smedley Butler
“It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.” ——General Stonewall Jackson
“People who are anxious to bring on war don’t know what they are bargaining for; they don’t see all the horrors that must accompany such an event.” ——General Stonewall Jackson
“Putting aside all the fancy words and academic doubletalk, the basic reason for having a military is to do two jobs–to kill people and to destroy.” ——General Thomas S. Power
“Any forces that would impose their will on other nations will certainly face defeat.” ——General Vo Nguyen Giap (Vietnam)
“The military doesn’t start wars. The politicians start wars.” ——General William Westmoreland
“Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.” ——George Bernard Shaw
“Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid…There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party…” ——George Bernard Shaw
“I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.” ——George H. W. Bush
“There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth.” ——George Jacob Holyoake
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” ——George Orwell
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.” ——George Orwell
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” ——George Orwell
“War is a way of shattering to pieces…materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and…too intelligent.” ——George Orwell
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.” ——George Orwell
“Our nation is somewhat sad, but we’re angry. There’s a certain level of blood lust, but we won’t let it drive our reaction. We’re steady, clear-eyed and patient, but pretty soon we’ll have to start displaying scalps.” ——George W. Bush
“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” ——George W. Bush
“I think war is a dangerous place.” ——George W. Bush
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful…They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” ——George W. Bush
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” ——George W. Bush
“What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” ——Georg W. Hegel
“Don’t regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with…” ——Gerard K. O’Neill
“Dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify.” ——Gerard K. O’Neill
“The only defensible war is a war of defense.” ——G. K. Chesterton
“A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over…is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.” ——G. K. Chesterton
“‘My country right or wrong’ is like saying, ‘My mother drunk or sober.'” ——G. K. Chesterton
“There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.” ——Golda Meir
“Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.” ——Gregory Bateson
“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” ——Groucho Marx
“Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.” ——Guy de Maupassant
“Although tyranny…may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” ——Hannah Arendt
“The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.” ——Hannah Arendt
“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.” ——Hannah Arendt
“War is a bankruptcy of policy.” ——Hans Van Seeckt
“War is the most striking instance of the failure of intelligence to master the problem of human relationships.” ——Harry Elmer Barnes
“I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses…” ——Harry Emerson Fosdick
“The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.” ——Harry Emerson Fosdick
“I hate war…for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.” ——Harry Emerson Fosdick
“The responsibility of the great states is to serve, and not to dominate, the world.” ——Harry S. Truman
“Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.” ——Havelock Ellis
“Emphasis on military prowess is an indication of philosophical poverty.” ——Henk Middelraad
“There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.” ——Henry Havelock Ellis
“What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.” ——Henry Kissinger
“It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow…that are the aftermath of war.” ——Herbert C. Hoover
“Old men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” ——Herbert C. Hoover
“A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.” ——Herbert V. Prochnow
“In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.” ——Herodotus
“It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.” ——H. G. Wells
“I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.” ——H. L. Mencken
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” ——H. L. Mencken
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” ——H. L. Mencken
“Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.” ——H. L. Mencken
“Force without judgement falls on its own weight.” ——Horace
“One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.” ——Howard Zinn
“How can you make a war on terror if war itself is terrorism?” ——Howard Zinn
“Historically, the most terrible things–war, genocide and slavery–have resulted from obedience, not disobedience.” ——Howard Zinn
“It’s more humane to cure your enemies than to kill them.” ——Hugh Mann
“Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people…” ——Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
“Suspicion must always fall on those who attempt to silence their opponents.” ——Ian Buckley
“Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‘War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'” ——Immanuel Kant