“A day will come when we will display cannon in museums just as we display instruments of torture today, and are amazed that such things could ever have been possible.”
Victor Hugo, French novelist, speaking to the 3rd International Peace Conference, Paris, August 1849
We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage.
James Russell Lowell, “The Bigelow Papers”
They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say “Shit, it’s raining!”
Ruby in “Cold Mountain” (Miramax, 2003)
When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.
Alan Alda
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
Let us learn our lessons […] Never believe any war will be smooth and easy or that anyone who embarks on that 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 … incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations.
Winston Churchill, quoted in Fein, Leonard, “This Time It’s Our War”, The Forward, July 25, 2003
I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration.
Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass”
Woe to that land that’s governed by a child.
3rd Citizen in William Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act 2, Scene 3
God keep lead out of me!
Falstaff in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, Scene 3
Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded.
James Madison
Contrary to what you’ve just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners; only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy. If you’d like to learn more about war, there’s lots of good books in your local library, many of them with cool gory pictures.
Bart Simpson in “Bart the General” (Season 1)
The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.
James Madison
There’s a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn’t a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
Barbara Kingsolver
Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III Scene VI
You can’t say that civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers, New York Times, December 23, 1929
War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Inertia is the brother of fear.
Sir Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, Simon & Schuster, 1984
Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths…I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?
Barbara Bush on ABC’s “Good Morning America” March 18, 2003
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
William Butler Yeats, “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” (1922)
Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) (560-483 BCE)
Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.
Donald Rumsfeld
Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.
Alice Thomas Ellis (Anna Haycraft)
In nomine Domini incipit omne malum. (Every evil begins in the name of the Lord.)
anonymous
Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
A pirate, from St. Augustine’s “City of God”
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, from remarks by the president at the signing of The Defense Appropriations Act for 2005 (8/5/04)
Blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed.
Bruce Springsteen, part of Springsteen’s introduction to his 1985 version of Edwin Starr’s song ‘War.’
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
James Madison
That maxim, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’ it’s not an argument against atheism – it’s an argument against foxholes.
James Morrow, ”Towing Jehovah”
Why of course the people don’t want war, Goering shrugged. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether in a democracy, 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 any country.
Hermann Goering at the Nuremburg trials, as recorded by Gustave Gilbert, cited at http://snopes.com/quotes/goering
A riot is the language of the unheard.
Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
If we let people see that sort of thing, there would never again be any war.
Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War
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. In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents, which is in itself a violation of the beliefs of all religions. Once we characterize our adversaries as beyond the scope of God’s mercy and grace, their lives lose all value. We deny personal responsibility when we plant land mines and, days or years later, a stranger to us — often a child – is crippled or killed. From a great distance, we launch bombs or missiles with almost total impunity, and never want to know the number or identity of the victims.
Jimmy Carter, Nobel Lecture, December 10, 2002
Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is delightful to the inexperienced).
Erasmus
A threat is basically a means for establishing a bargaining position by inducing fear in the subject. When a threat is used, it should always be implied that the subject himself is to blame by using words such as “You leave me no other choice but to…” He should never be told to comply “or else!”
CIA ‘Human Resources’ Manual for Latin America, 1997
A people is never defeated until the hearts of the women are on the ground.
Cheyenne saying
windshepherd 