Quotes about war
page 26

Wilhelm Canaris photo

“As the officer before the World War was naturally a monarchist…so it is naturally understandable today…to be a National Socialist…The Wehrmacht has become the tool of the National Socialist will for development.”

Wilhelm Canaris (1887–1945) German admiral, head of military intelligence service

1938. Quoted in "Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II" - Page 234 by David Kahn - True Crime - 2000

Joschka Fischer photo

“I would never shake the hand of a person like the German foreign minister, nor would I let him in my house. He is the prototype of a shameful politician; the one who makes a career as a protester and a friend of the peace, in order to use his official ideals to get a well paid position as a war mongering foreign minister. A political scum.”

Joschka Fischer (1948) German politician

Jan Myrdal in a speech against the European Union in the Swedish town Falun. http://web.fib.se/visa_fast_info.asp?Avdelning=017&Sidrubrik=Nyheter&Rubrik=F%F6r%20nationen%20och%20kulturen&Meny=027&e=e005

Robin Lane Fox photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“If America busies itself not with elective wars, but with commerce, the shift in power and prestige will be away from politicians who prosecute wars, and back to The People who produce prosperity.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Donald, Don’t Let Fox News Roger America… Again,” https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/09/ilana-mercer/finally-a-just-war/LewRockwell.com, September 25, 2015.
2010s, 2015

Yagyū Munenori photo

“Throwing down your own sword is also an art of war. If you have attained mastery of swordlessness, you will never lack for a sword. The opponent's sword is your sword. This is acting at the vanguard of the moment.”

Yagyū Munenori (1571–1646) samurai and daimyo of the early Edo period

As quoted in Soul of the Samurai (2005) by Thomas Cleary, p. 28
Variant translation: If you have attained mastery of swordlessness, you will never be without a sword.

Patrick Buchanan photo
David Low (cartoonist) photo

“I have never met anyone who wasn't against war. Even Hitler and Mussolini were, according to themselves.”

David Low (cartoonist) (1891–1963) British cartoonist

New York Times Magazine, February 10, 1946.

Lloyd deMause photo
George W. Bush photo
Chuichi Nagumo photo

“I have declared war on pain.”

John Bonica (1917–1994) Anesthesiologist; pioneer in pain management

The Management of Pain (1954)

Calvin Coolidge photo

“A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" (1988–9), in Fanged Noumena, p. 79

“If Abu Musab Zarqawi's camps in Iraq are connected to al-Qaeda, why didn't the U. S. already attack them as part of the War on Terrorism after September 11, 2001? It's as if the U. S. preserved Ansar al-Islam for later use for leverage over Iraq and an excuse for an invasion.”

Carl Romanelli (1959) American artist

on Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations
[February 10, 2003, http://www.gp.org/press/pr_02_10_03.html, Press release: "Greens Challenge Powell's Speech at the U.N.", U.S. Green Party, 2006-08-17]

“You--i. e. the US--didn't wreck Iraq a fraction as much as we--i. e. Iraqis--did. The looting for instance destroyed orders of magnitude more infrastructure than the war ever did.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Kanan Makiya speaks about Iraq 5 years later...", Washington Post (March 20, 2008)

David Attenborough photo
James K. Morrow photo

“Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 14 (p. 164)

Francis Parkman photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

4 February 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

Albert Einstein photo
Bob Dylan photo

“The words fill my head, and fall to the floor, that if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964), With God On Our Side

Stephen Harper photo
Richard Holbrooke photo

“Our meeting with Admiral Leighton Smith, on the other hand, did not go well. He had been in charge of the NATO air strikes in August and September [1995], and this gave him enormous credibility, especially with the Bosnian Serbs. Smith was also the beneficiary of a skillful public relations effort that cast him as the savior of Bosnia. In a long profile, Newsweek had called him "a complex warrior and civilizer, a latter-day George C. Marshall." This was quite a journalistic stretch, given the fact that Smith considered the civilian aspects of the task beneath him and not his job - quite the opposite of what General Marshall stood for.
After a distinguished thirty-three-year Navy career, including almost three hundred combat missions in Vietnam, Smith was well qualified for his original post as commander of NATO's southern forces and Commander in Chief of all U. S. naval forces in Europe. But he was the wrong man for his additional assignment as IFOR commander, which was the result of two bureaucratic compromises, one with the French, the other with the American military. General Joulwan rightly wanted the sixty thousand IFOR soldiers to have as their commanding officer an Army general trained in the use of ground forces. But Paris insisted that if Joulwan named a separate Bosnia commander, it would have to be a Frenchman. This was politically impossible for the United States; thus, the Franh objections left only one way to preserve an American chain of command - to give the job to Admiral Smith, who joked that he was now known as "General" Smith. (…)
On the military goals of Dayton, he was fine; his plans for separating the forces along the line we had drawn in Dayton and protecting his forces were first-rate. But he was hostile to any suggestions that IFOR help implement any nonmilitary portion of the agreement. This, he said repeatedly, was not his job.
Based on Shalikashvili's statement at White House meetings, Christopher and I had assumed that the IFOR commander would use his authority to do substancially more than he was obligated to do. The meeting with Smith shattered that hope. Smith and his British deputy, General Michael Walker, made clear that they intended to take a minimalist approach to all aspects of implementation other than force protection. Smith signaled this in his first extensive public statement to the Bosnian people, during a live call-in program on Pale Television - an odd choice for his first local media appearance. During the program, he answered a question in a manner that dangerously narrowed his own authority. He later told Newsweek about it with a curious pride: "One of the questions I was asked was, "Admiral, is it true that IFOR is going to arrest Serbs in the Serb suburbs of Sarajevo?" I said, "Absolutely not, I don't have the authority to arrest anybody"."”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

This was an inaccurate way to describe IFOR's mandate. It was true IFOR was not supposed to make routine arrests of ordinary citizens. But IFOR had the authority to arrest indicted war criminals, and could also detain anyone who posed a threat to its forces. Knowing what the question meant, Smith had sent an unfortunate signal of reassurance to Karadzic - over his own network.
Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p.327-329

Will Rogers photo

“Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

As quoted in Wit (2003) by Des MacHale, p. 299
As quoted in ...

Lewis Black photo

“If I wanted to be bored by 6,000 pages of unreadable dreck, I'd read War and Peace four times.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Taxed Beyond Belief (2002)

Benito Mussolini photo

“We declare war against socialism, not because it is socialism, but because it has opposed nationalism…. We intend to be an active minority, attract the proletariat away from the official Socialist party. But if the middle class thinks that we are going to be their lightning rods, they are mistaken.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Mussolini’s speech in Milan (March 23, 1919), quoted in Stanislao G. Pugliese, Fascism, Anti-fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present, Oxford, England, UK, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., (2004) p. 43
1910s

Joseph Massad photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Euripidés photo

“Ares (The God of War) hates those who hesitate.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Heraclidæ (c 428 BC) line 722
Alternate translation : Ares hates the sluggard most of all. (translated by David Kovacs)

Bill Whittle photo
Eugen Drewermann photo
Carl von Clausewitz photo
Michael Crichton photo
Melanie Phillips photo
George S. Patton IV photo
Miguel de Unamuno photo
Bill Downs photo
Eldridge Cleaver photo

“All the gods are dead except the god of war.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Part I: "'The Christ' and His Teachings"
1960s, Soul on Ice (1968)

Mahmud of Ghazni photo
Marsha Blackburn photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo
Karl Marlantes photo
Martin Amis photo
Mike Pence photo
Harlan Ellison photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“We've been there on World Wars, it's time for World Party I.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Comment by Bonta on her blog, tweet about social media and World Party Day.[citation needed]

Norman Angell photo
Will Cuppy photo
Rudolph Rummel photo
Gustav Stresemann photo

“If one wants to avoid war in Europe for a long time, then one must remove the things which are unsettling to a certain extent, and they include the separation of Germany from East Prussia which in my opinion is unpolitical and is seen as oppressive. But it is not at all an immediate question and certainly not a question of war.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Letter to Rauscher (8 March 1924), quoted in Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest Statesman (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 269
1920s

André Maurois photo
Robert S. McNamara photo

“I must say I don't object to its being called McNamara's War. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”

Robert S. McNamara (1916–2009) American businessman and Secretary of Defense

Source: United States. Congress. Senate (1964) Hearings, Vol. 4, p. 177: Of the Vietnam War

J. C. R. Licklider photo

“I came to MIT from Harvard University, where I was a lecturer. I had been at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory during World War II and stayed on at Harvard as a lecturer, mainly doing research, but also a little bit of teaching—statistics and physiological psychology—subjects like that.
Then there came a time that I thought that I had better go pay attention to my career. I had just been having a marvelous time there. I am not a good looker for jobs; I just came to the nearest place I could, which was in our city. I arranged to come down here and start up a psychology section, which we hoped would eventually become a psychology department. For the purposes of having a base of some kind I was in the Electrical Engineering Department. I even taught a little bit of electrical engineering.
I fell in love with the summer study process that MIT had. They had one on undersea warfare and overseas transport—a thing called Project Hartwell. I really liked that. It was getting physicists, mathematicians—everybody who could contribute—to work very intensively for a period of two or three months. After Hartwell there was a project called Project Charles, which was actually two years long (two summers and the time in between). It was on air defense. I was a member of that study. They needed one psychologist and 20 physicists. That led to the creation of the Lincoln Laboratory. It got started immediately as the applied section of the Research Laboratory for Electronics, which was already a growing concern at MIT.”

J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990) American psychologist and computer scientist

Licklider in: " An Interview with J. C. R. LICKLIDER http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107436/1/oh150jcl.pdf" conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg on 28 October 1988, Cambridge, MA.

George Santayana photo

“In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 159

Svetlana Alliluyeva photo

“When my mother left us, he [Stalin] was left completely alone. And I think what came next, in the late 30s and after the war in the 40s - I think that was a result of his complete loneliness on top of the world. Nobody would argue with him anymore.”

Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011) daughter of Joseph Stalin

Stalin's daughter Lana Peters dies in US of cancer http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15931683, BBC News, (29 November, 2011).

“President Obama repeated the grandiose nonsense that has tainted American foreign policy since World War II, the hubristic absurdity that the United States is the one indispensable nation in world affairs.”

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

2012, " The State of the Union is Still a State of War http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7189"

“War is a convenient fix for government problems if it happens somewhere else. To other people.”

Sherwood Smith (1951) American fantasy and science fiction writer

Treason's Shore (Inda #4, 2009)

Ron Paul photo
William Temple photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Francesco Guicciardini photo

“Never wage war on religion, nor upon seemingly holy institutions, for this thing has too great a force upon the minds of fools.”

Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) Italian writer, historian and politician

Non combattete mai con la religione, né con le cose che pare che dependono da Dio; perché questo obietto ha troppa forza nella mente degli sciocchi.
Number 253.
Counsels and Reflections (1857)

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey photo

“Monotheism came to this country for the first time as the war-cry of Islamic invaders who marched in with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other. It proclaimed that there was no God but Allah and that Muhammad was the Prophet of Allah. It claimed that Allah had completed his Revelation in the Quran and that Muslims who possessed that Book were the Chosen People. It invoked a theology which called upon the believers to convert or kill the infidels, particularly the idolaters, capture their women and children and sell them into slavery and concubinage all over the world, slaughter their sages and saints and priests, break or at least desecrate their idols, destroy or convert into mosques their places of worship, plunder their properties, occupy their lands, and heap humiliations on such of them as cannot be converted or killed either due to their capacity for fighting back or the need of the conquerors for slave labour. The enormities which the votaries of Islamic Monotheism practised on a vast scale and for a long time vis-a-vis Hindu religion, culture and society, were unheard of by Hindus in the whole of their hoary history. Muslim theologians, sufis and historians who witnessed or read or heard of these doings hailed the doers as soldiers of Allah and heroes of Islam. They thanked Allah and the Prophet who had declared a permanent war on the infidels and bestowed their progeny and properties on the believers. They quoted chapter and verse from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet in order to prove that what was being done to Hindus was fully in keeping with the highest teachings of Islam.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Ron Paul photo
Bernie Sanders photo

“My ears may have been playing a trick on me, but I thought I heard the gentleman a moment ago say something quote unquote about homos in the military. Was I right in hearing that expression? Was the gentleman referring to the thousands and thousands of gay people who have put their lives on the line in countless wars defending this country? Was that the groups of people that the gentleman was referring to? You have insulted thousands of men and women who have put their lives on the line. I think they are owed an apology.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Speaking to Representative Duke Cunningham on the floor of the House of Representatives, 11 May 1995, from Watch Bernie Sanders Demolish A Republican Over ‘Homos In The Military’ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-duke-cunningham-homophobia_us_56cb75eee4b041136f17dc9f by Zach Carter, The Huffington Post (22 February 2016)
1990s

Regina Spektor photo

“Living in your pre-war apartment
Soon to be your post-war apartment”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Machine
Far (2009)

Ernest Hemingway photo
George W. Bush photo
Zbigniew Brzeziński photo
Jadunath Sarkar photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Theodore Dalrymple photo

“Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

It is the inescapable duty of every decent citizen to express no interest in or enthusiasm for football and the World Cup http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000966.php (June 7, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Rudyard Kipling photo

“Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Ballad of the King's Jest, Stanza 4
Other works

George W. Bush photo
Agnes Repplier photo
Cecil Rhodes photo
Robert A. Taft photo
Barbara W. Tuchman photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

1910s, The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)

Gore Vidal photo
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad photo

“The United States has never entered a serious war, and has never been victorious.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

September 21, 2010 interview http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/ahmadinejad-when-a-war-starts-it-knows-no-limits/63312/
2010

Winston S. Churchill photo

“The wars fanned the wings of science, and science brought to mankind a thousand blessings, a thousand problems and a thousand perils.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

This Age of Government by Great Dictators, News of the World, 10 October 1937
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 395. ISBN 0903988453
The 1930s

Leonard Peikoff photo

“To those who oppose war, I ask: If not now, when? How many more corpses are necessary before this country should take action?”

Leonard Peikoff (1933) Canadian-American philosopher

Fifty Years of Appeasement Led to Black Tuesday http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/547068/posts?page=152 (12 September 2001)
2000s

Robert M. La Follette Sr. photo
Phil Ochs photo

“It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

"I Ain't Marching Anymore" http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/i-aint-marching-anymore.html from I Ain't Marching Anymore(1965)
Lyrics

Jimmy Carter photo
John Tyler photo

“Patronage is the sword and cannon by which war may be made on the liberty of the human race.”

John Tyler (1790–1862) American politician, 10th President of the United States (in office from 1841 to 1845)

Speech in Congress (24 February 1834) against the policies of Andrew Jackson.

Clement Attlee photo

“I take it to be a fundamental assumption that whatever post-war international organisation is established, it will be our aim to maintain the British Commonwealth as an international entity, recognised as such by foreign countries. … If we are to carry our full weight in the post-war world with the US and USSR, it can only be as a united British Commonwealth.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

'The Relations of the British Commonwealth to the Post-War International Political Organisation' (June 1943), quoted in Correlli Barnett, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities 1945–1950 (Pan, 1995), p. 51.
War Cabinet

John Bright photo
Arthur Ponsonby photo
Anthony Watts photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought – destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position – leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that – like Chomsky – looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"In enemy territory? An interview with Christopher Hitchens." http://www.johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens, Interview with Johann Hari (2004-09-23): On the Bosnian War
2000s, 2004