“To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.” ——Ludwig von Mises
“The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor’s heart – and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.” ——Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil
“If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks.” ——Frederick the Great
“There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland.” ——George W. Bush, speech, August 7, 2002
“The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.” ——James Madison (1751-1836), American Statesman, Fourth President of the US
“The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.” ——Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945), Nazi Propaganda Minister, The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943
“All wars are sacred… to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars in reality are money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators.” ——Rhett Butler, from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind
“I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.” ——Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, speech, 1933
“The president has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.” ——Arthur Schlesinger
“The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.” ——Louis Simpson
“We could not leave them to themselves — they were unfit for self-government — and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was… there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” ——William McKinley (1843-1901), 25th US President, 1899, on the Filipinos, following the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1898, during which U.S. forces killed an estimated 200,000 Filipino civilians
“Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.” ——Edward Abbey
“We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: ‘Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.'” ——Julia Ward Howe
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ——Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
“Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.” ——H.H. the Dalai Lama
“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.” ——Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Colvin, 1810
“Peace is good for all peoples except those profiteers who profit from war.” ——Gary Amirault
“In the tapes confiscated from President Nixon is recorded a conversation with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. They were discussing bombing the dikes in Vietnam. Kissinger stated that might kill 200,000 people. Then Nixon suggested using a nuclear bomb rather than bombing the dikes which would only kill 200,000 people, mostly civilians. Then Nixon said, speaking of using nuclear weapons, ‘I just want you to think big, for Christ’s sake.’ Both these men are among the most depraved in society. These kinds of minds usually rise to the top to join men like Nero, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot.” ——Gary Amirault
“Military necessity does not admit of cruelty.” ——President Lincoln, 1863
“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” ——Thomas Merton
“To those who have called me a coward I say that they are wrong, and that without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that fear was there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill, there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself to my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, the man I wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me.” ——Sgt. Camilo Mejia, who served one year in prison for refusing to return to fight in Iraq, released February 15, 2005
“I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.” ——Admiral Gene LaRocque
“Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility.” ——Bishop Desmond Tutu (1931- ), Nobel Prize for Peace 1984
“An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.” ——Charles de Montesquieu, French Politician and Philosopher (1689-1755)
“A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.” ——Joseph Addison, English poet
“It was a failure of citizenship of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Thus, every U.S. citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis.” ——Dahr Jamail, Independent Journalist, War Reporter
“Conquered states that have been accustomed to liberty and the government of their own laws can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them; the second, for the conqueror to go and reside there in person; and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of a few, who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror.” ——Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.” ——Douglas MacArthur, American General who commanded the Southwest Pacific Theatre in World War II (1880-1964)
“Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?” ——William Blum
“Wars and lies are bosom buddies.” ——Gary Amirault
“Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.” ——Henry Ford, My Life and Work
“After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.” ——Salman Rushdie, preface, The Jaguar Smile
“My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.” ——Henry Ford, My Life and Work
“A mind at peace does not engender wars.” ——Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
“Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.” ——Walt Whitman, Reconciliation
“Weakness and ambivalence lead to war.” ——George H. W. Bush, RNC acceptance speech, August 18, 1988
“The act of war is the last option of a democracy.” ——Joseph C. Wilson, New York Times, July 6, 2003
“History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” ——Ronald Reagan, speech, January 16, 1984
“With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a ‘smart bomb,’ it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered ‘just,’ because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary.” ——Howard Zinn, Howard Zinn on War
“War’s one of those things, don’t you think, where everyone always thinks they’re in the right — have you noticed that? Nobody ever says we’re the bad guys, we’re going to beat shit out of the good guys.” ——Caryl Churchill, A Number
“Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them… they may be forced to die by them.” ——Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion
“It is interesting… how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.” ——Don DeLillo, Underworld
“If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.” ——Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
“War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.” ——Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
“The power of making war often prevents it.” ——Thomas Jefferson, letter to General Washington, December 4, 1788
“Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.” ——Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace
“There would be an end of war and preparations for war if the cost were borne by those responsible for war. There would be an end of armaments and preparedness if incomes and inheritances and the landed estates of the feudal classes paid for the protection which their privileges enjoy. War and preparations for war are possible only because the ruling classes are able to shift a great part of the cost onto the poor by indirect taxation and loans.” ——Frederic Clemson Howe, Why War
“We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.” ——Carl von Clausewitz, On War
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.” ——Adrienne Rich, What is Found There
“For most of history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering was always significant. Only in the past century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumption of civilized societies that war is inevitable and often useful.” ——Gwynne Dyer, War: The Lethal Custom
“War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ‘realistically’; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.” ——Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
“War can only be abolished through war… in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” ——Mao Zedong, Problems of War and Strategy
“People do not want war. War springs from causes wholly outside the lives, interests, and feelings of the people.” ——Frederic Clemson Howe, Why War
“War is a contagion.” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt, speech, October 5, 1937
“We don’t call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny: those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor.” ——Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars
“War demands sacrifice of the people. It gives only suffering in return.” ——Frederic Clemson Howe, Why War
“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” ——Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 16, 1953
“War is not a life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted.” ——T. S. Eliot, A Note on War Poetry
“I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” ——Barack Obama, The New Yorker, May 31, 2004