quotations about war
The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.
HOWARD ZINN
Terrorism and War
When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Plague
War is no strife
To the dark house and the detested wife.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
All's Well That Ends Well
Free, open-eyed,
We rush like bridegrooms to Death's grisly arms:
Surely the very longing for that clasp
Proves us immortal. Immortality
Alone could teach this mortal how to die.
Perhaps, war is but Heaven's great ploughshare, driven
Over the barren, fallow earthly fields,
Preparing them for harvest; rooting up
Grass, weeds, and flowers, which necessary fall,
That in these furrows the wise Husbandman
May drop celestial seed.
DINAH CRAIK
"Looking Death in the Face"
War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world.... War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it.
JOSEPH DE MAISTRE
"Seventh Dialogue"
The nation having the strongest war footing can easily find an excuse for going to war.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
HOWARD ZINN
The Progressive, November 2001
While Congress cuts programs for basic human needs, our costs of post-9/11 wars -- including future veteran care -- stand at $4.4 trillion. We've spent $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security. Yet spending those same dollars on peaceful industry -- education, health care, infrastructure, and renewable energy -- could produce many more and better paying jobs.
DOUG WINGEIER
letter to the Editor, Smoky Mountain News, February 3, 2016
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 not a life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T. S. ELIOT
A Note on War Poetry
War is like air, in every house, in every land, on every sea.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
War is not pretty from any angle, and the most vulnerable organ in the body is the brain.
FRANK LAWLIS
PTSD Breakthrough: The Revolutionary, Science-Based Compass RESET Program
For what can war but endless war still breed?
JOHN MILTON
On the Lord General Fairfax
Want is both parent and child of war.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy -- for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
journal entry, July 21, 1944
Beware the toils of war ... the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.
HOMER
The Iliad
Superiority in war ... cannot surely be a proof of justice, since wars are often unjustly undertaken, and successfully, though wickedly, carried on and concluded.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Eventually, you hope. Obviously, we're not in a position at the moment for the eradication of war to seem like anything but a far-off dream. But at one time, the eradication of slave markets in the United States seemed very far off. I mean, people have to begin somewhere. We can change. We can evolve as a species. It's not simple, and it's a very long and drawn-out process, but you can hope.
SUZANNE COLLINS
interview, Hogwarts Professor, August 15, 2010
What lackeys men are, who might be such fine fellows!
To be killing each other, unmercifully,
At an order, as though one said, "Bring up the tea."
AMY LOWELL
"A Ballad of Footmen"
No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
"Notes on the Next War", Esquire, September 1935