War

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
-- Jose Narosky

(After a war) The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
-- Adolf Hitler

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
-- Thomas Alva Edison

War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.
-- Charles Evans Hughes

Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it,
what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?
-- Douglas Jerrold

Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?
-- Holly Near

If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the rank.
-- Frederick The Great

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

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
-- Eugene Debs

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.
-- Alexander Berkman

Everything, everything in war is barbaric… But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.
-- Ellen Key

What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?
-- Madeleine Albright, to General Colin Powell, as quoted in Powell's book 'My American Journey', 1995

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.
-- Louis Simpson

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
-- Ernest Hemingway

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.
-- Anatole France, L'Humanité (July 1922)

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
-- Kahlil Gibran

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville

It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.
-- Andre Gide

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
-- Abraham Flexner

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society these irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
-- Randolph Bourne

Naturally, the common people don't want war… but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
-- Hermann Goering

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out… and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel… And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth.
-- Mark Twain

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Russian author (1828-1910)

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press… have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence - death - is hidden from public view.
-- Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for New York Times

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States (1890-1969)

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
-- Robert Lynd (1879-1949), Anglo-Irish essayist, journalist

It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.
-- Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

The Pentagon recently justified its position on censorship by insisting: "If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war."
-- from 'Military Blunders' - article by Geoffrey Regan in 'Night and Day' (Mail on Sunday supplement) 23rd January 2000