“Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

— H. G. Wells, book The War of the Worlds

Book I, Ch. 1: The Eve of the War
The War of the Worlds (1898)
Context: And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

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H. G. Wells142

English writer 1866–1946

Karl Löwith (1897–1973) German philosopher

Meaning in History (1949), p. 210

“Allah's Apostle called: "War is deceit."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated Abu Huraira, in Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 268
Sunni Hadith

“He’d caused the First Native War on Mars, by taking advantage of the fact that at that time human law had not defined the killing of Martians as murder.”

Murray Leinster (1896–1975) Novelist, short story writer

The Aliens, p. 92 (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1957).
Short fiction, Anthropological Note (1957)

“You cannot wage war with sentimentality. The more ruthlessly war is conducted, the more merciful is it in fact, for it finishes the war the sooner.”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

Remark (November 1914), Paul Dehn, Hindenburg, als Erzieher (1918), p. 12, quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 74
Supreme Commander of All German Forces in the East

“Soldiers don't complain… I am not going to do it; I will pretend this is part of a war.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett A Little Princess

Source: A Little Princess

“With this horrendous murder of the Jews we have lost the war. We have brought an indelible shame upon ourselves, a curse that cannot be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty together.”

Wilm Hosenfeld (1895–1952) Righteous Among the Nations

16 June 1943; attributed by Richard J. Evans in " Why Did Stauffenberg Plant the Bomb? http://www.signandsight.com/features/1824.html", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 23 January 2009.