quotes, quotations and thoughts on war

peace

war	One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one. Agatha Christie

I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it. I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another. Harry Emerson Fosdick

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. . . . Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official. Theodore Roosevelt

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Winston Churchill Peace is the happy, natural state of humans; war, our corruption, our disgrace. James Thomson

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. George Bernard Shaw

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter
how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not
learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

Jimmy Carter

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There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes
it will be from failure of human wisdom.

Andrew B. Law

In olden times when there was a war, it was a human-to-human
confrontation. The victor in battle would directly see the blood
and suffering of the defeated enemy. Nowadays, it is much more
terrifying because a person in an office can push a button and kill
millions of people and never see the human tragedy that he or she
has created. The mechanization of war, the mechanization
of human conflict, poses an increasing threat to peace.

the Dalai Lama

In time of war the first casualty is truth.

Boake Carter

Truth does not come from the barrel of a gun, or from the mouth of a politician.

unattributed

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

Benjamin Franklin

Can anything be stupider than that others have the right to kill me
because they live on the other side of a river and their ruler has a
quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with them?

Blaise Pascal

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem,
it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

David Friedman

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed. 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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a
modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants,
each serving a town of 60,000. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is
some fifty miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single destroyer with new
homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the
best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

peace

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen
blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud.
I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have
seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I know war as few other people now living know it, and nothing to me
is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its
very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless
as a method of settling international disputes.

Douglas MacArthur

Let us, in good psychiatric fashion, look at the facts. In the last one hundred years we, in the Western world, have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call “war.” Aside from smaller wars, we had larger ones in 1870, 1914 and 1939. During these wars, every participant firmly believed that he was fighting in his self-defense, for his honor, or that he was backed up by God. The groups with whom one is at war are, often from one day to the next, looked upon as cruel, irrational fiends, whom one must defeat to save the world from evil. But a few years after the mutual slaughter is over, the enemies of yesterday are our friends, the friends of yesterday our enemies, and again in full seriousness we begin to paint them with appropriate colors of black and white. At this moment, in the year 1955, we are prepared for a mass slaughter which would, if it came to pass, surpass any slaughter the human race has arranged so far. One of the greatest discoveries in the field of natural science is prepared for this purpose. Everybody is looking with a mixture of confidence and apprehension to the “statesmen” of the various peoples, ready to heap all praise on them if they “succeed in avoiding a war,” and ignoring the fact that it is only these very statesmen who ever cause a war, usually not even through their bad intentions, but by their unreasonable mismanagement of the affairs entrusted to them.

Erich Fromm
The Sane Society

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can
no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer be of concern
to great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and
waters and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and
the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Humankind
must put an end to war or war will put an end to humankind.

John F. Kennedy

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know
more about war than we know about peace, more about killing
than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery
of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Omar Bradley

There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders.

Ralph Bunche

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,
easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

General Smedley Butler

The great error of nearly all studies of war. . . has been to consider
war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.

Simone Weil

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight
and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men,
making their wars that boys must die.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

The only antidote to the poison of war is the public's
courage to disagree with their leader.

Ramman Kenoun

War is a sin.
War is the highest degree of immorality.
War is inhuman insanity
for it kills sacred human lives wholesale.
How can there still be any war on our miraculous planet?

Robert Muller

When the Regiment Came Back

All the uniforms were blue, all the swords were bright and new,
   When the regiment went marching down the street,
All the men were hale and strong as they proudly moved along,
   Through the cheers that drowned the music of their feet.
Oh the music of the feet keeping time to drums that beat,
   Oh the splendour and the glitter of the sight,
As with swords and rifles new and in uniforms of blue
   The regiment went marching to the fight!

When the regiment came back all the guns and swords were black
   And the uniforms had faded out to gray,
And the faces of the men who marched through that street again
   Seemed like faces of the dead who lose their way.
For the dead who lose their way cannot look more wan and gray.
   Oh the sorrow and the pity of the sight,
Oh the weary lagging feet out of step with drums that beat,
   As the regiment comes marching from the fight.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites
and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war.

Thomas Merton

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War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight
their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village
and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with
guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.

Thomas Carlyle

The force of arms cannot do what peace does.
If you can gain your desired end with sugar, why use poison?

from the Somadeva

The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperation
among nations, can be fortified not by weapons of war but by
wheat and cotton, by milk and wool, by meat and timber, and
by rice. These are words that translate into every language.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Those who conduct an atomic war for freedom will die, or end their
lives miserably. Instead of freedom they will find destruction.
Radioactive clouds resulting from a war between East and West
would imperil all life everywhere. There would be no need to use
up the remaining stock of atom and H-bombs. An atomic war is
therefore the most senseless and lunatic act that could ever
take place. At all costs it must be prevented.

Albert Schweitzer