quotations about war
The power of making war often prevents it.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to General Washington, December 4, 1788
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
In this day and age, our world cannot endure the effects of a global war. We are at the point where single governments can decimate entire populations at the push of a button. We have developed the capacity to destroy ourselves, our entire human race. We continuously live balancing on the edge of a knife's blade.
JAY FALLIS
"War is the true enemy", Orillia Packet & Times, April 19, 2017
War is what happens when language fails.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Robber Bride
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
I came to the conclusion that war was an unacceptable way of solving whatever problems there were in the world--that there would be problems of tyranny, of injustice, of nations crossing frontiers and that injustice and tyranny should not be tolerated and should be fought and resisted, but the one thing that must not be used to solve that problem is war. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. And that fact overwhelms whatever moral cause is somewhere buried in the history of that war.
HOWARD ZINN
Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches, 1963-2009
On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Paris France
I cannot now, as I once did, talk lightly, thoughtlessly, of fighting with this or that nation. That nation is no longer an abstraction to me. It is no longer a vague mass. It spreads out before me into individuals, in a thousand interesting forms and relations. It consists of husbands and wives, parents and children, who love one another as I love my own home. It consists of affectionate women and sweet children. It consists of Christians united with me to the common Savior, and in whose spirit I recognize the likeness of his divine virtue. It consists of a vast multitude of laborers at the plough and in the workshop, whose toils I sympathize with, whose burden I should rejoice to lighten, and for whose elevation I have pleaded. It consists of men of science, taste, genius, whose writings have beguiled my solitary hours, and given life to my intellect and best affections. Here is the nation which I am called to fight with, into whose families I must send mourning, whose fall or humiliation I must seek through blood. I cannot do it without a clear commission from God.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
It is not numbers or strength that bring the victories in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods' gift of a stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them.
XENOPHON
The Persian Expedition
War may be the game of kings, but, like the games at ancient Rome, it is generally exhibited to please and pacify the people.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.
KURT VONNEGUT
Cat's Cradle
Weary war with the bated breath,
Skeleton boy against skeleton Death.
FRANCIS O. TICKNOR
"Little Giffen of Tennessee"
For as long as men and women have talked about war, they have talked about it in terms of right and wrong. And for almost as long, some among them have derided such talk, called it a charade, insisted that war lies beyond (or beneath) moral judgment. War is a world apart, where life itself is at stake, where human nature is reduced to its elemental forms, where self-interest and necessity prevail. Here men and women do what they must to save themselves and their communities, and morality and law have no place. Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent.
MICHAEL WALZER
Just and Unjust Wars
People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
In a real war, no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners.
J. G. BALLARD
Empire of the Sun
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
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
HANNAH ARENDT
"On Violence", Crises of the Republic
Men who fight wars in winter don't live till spring.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Planet of Exile
It is idle to say that we are still able to carry on the war, if we cannot carry it on without renouncing, for the sake of revenue, the means of making war with effect. It is like a soldier selling his arms, to enable him to continue his march.
JAMES STEPHEN
War in Disguise