Quotes about war
page 27

“The people of Afghanistan should know that America is not their friend and that America's war and peace with all other countries are based on its own interests.”

Ali Meshkini (1922–2007) Iranian ayatollah

Tehran Hosting Intifada Confernce http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iran/2002/20-030602.html March 2002. 2002

People, Peace, Country

“Right now, the choice isn't between war and peace. It is between war and endless war.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

Hardball with Chris Matthews, November 16 2004
2000s

Peace

“I take it for granted there can be no controversy about what that resistance amounts to. It can only be done by levying war against the United States. The thing threatened is treason against the United States. There can be no controversy about that.”

Benjamin Stanton (1809–1872) American politician

Speech (1860)

“[Lloyd George] then went on to say that the Imperial Conference had had a meeting that morning, and that he, Smuts, Hughes and Massey did not intend to allow the British Empire to take a back seat. Gt Britain had won the war. She had made enormous sacrifices in men and money, and they were quite determined that she should not be overshadowed by America.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Lord Riddell's diary entry (July 1921), J. M. McEwen (ed.), The Riddell Diaries 1908-1923 (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 330
Prime Minister

Men, Money

“The assault on Malta will cost us many casualties… But I am the one who wants it because I consider it absolutely essential for the future development of the war. If we take Malta, Libya will be safe. If not, the situation of the colony will always be precarious.”

Ugo Cavallero (1880–1943) Italian general

Quoted in "From the Ashes of Disgrace" - Page 79 - by Franco Maugeri, Victor Rosen - 1948

Future

“The Dada movement was an anti-movement which corresponded to a need born of the first World War. Although neither literary nor pictorial in essence, Dada found its exponents in painters and writers scattered all over the world. Max Ernst's activities in Cologne in 1917 made him the foremost representative of the Dada painters. Between 1919 and 1921 his paintings, drawings and collages depicting the world of the subconscious were already a foretaste of Surrealism... In fact his previous achievements had certainly influenced, to a great extent, the literary Surrealist exploration of the subconscious.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote in 'Appreciations of other artists': Max Ernst (painter, sculptor author) 1945, by Marcel Duchamp; as cited in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159
1921 - 1950

World, Drawing, Painting

“You can't fight a war on terror if you're ending a sentence with a preposition.”

John Hodgman book The Areas of My Expertise

April 25, 2006
The Areas of My Expertise (2005), Appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Fight

“We promised the Europeans freedom. It would be worse than dishonorable not to see that they have it. This might mean war with the Russians, but what of it? They have no air force, and their gasoline and ammunition supplies are low. I've seen their miserable supply trains; mostly wagons drawn by beaten up old horses or oxen. I'll say this; the Third Army alone and with damned few casualties, could lick what is left of the Russians in six weeks. You mark my words. Don't ever forget them. Someday we will have to fight them and it will take six years and cost us six million lives.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

As quoted in The Unknown Patton (1983) by Charles M. Province, p. 100

Freedom, Horse, Fight, Training

“I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this enemy — it is an enemy and I'm not a pacifist.
I think what happened on Sept. 11 was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that I feel that way. But I do feel that the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Salon interview (2001)

People, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“My father had served with great honor and courage in the Second World War. He fought for a country that was not only great, but good. It had its flaws and had some imperfections. It was the original sin of slavery which you know which we hadn't completed extirpated because we still had racial injustice in the 50s and 60s and 70s. We had only recently abolished, formally abolished segregation. So I was aware that uh, America had its flaws and defects in its history. But I also believed in the country and believed in its principles. That's the way I was brought up and so I was shocked when I found people who were just openly, vociferously anti-American, condemning not only America's sins but America itself, condemning its principles and pointing in some cases to communist regimes like Cuba as being superior.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2016, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

People, World, Way, History

“Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

Soul, Autumn, Memory, Dead

“Put down the banks, and if this country could not be carried through the longest war against her most powerful enemy without ever knowing the want of a dollar, without dependence on the traitorous classes of her citizens, without bearing hard on the resources of the people, or loading the public with an indefinite burden of debt, I know nothing of my countrymen. Not by any novel project, not by any charlatanerie, but by ordinary and well-experienced means; by the total prohibition of all private paper at all times, by reasonable taxes in war aided by the necessary emissions of public paper of circulating size, this bottomed on special taxes, redeemable annually as this special tax comes in, and finally within a moderate period.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1815. http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/gallatin1.html ME 14:356 Posthumous publications, On financial matters

People, Time, Dependency, Country

“You fight about money, 'bout me and my brother.
And this I come home to, this is my shelter.
It ain't easy growin' up in World War III,
Never knowin what love could be, you'll see.
I don't want love to destroy me like it has done my family.”

Pink (singer) (1979) American singer-songwriter

Family Portrait, written by Pink and Scott Storch
Song lyrics, Missundaztood (2001)

Love, Money, World, Family

“If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

John Pilger, This much i know http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/13/pressandpublishing.observermagazine, The Observer, 13 November 2005

Death, Children, Support

“[The] Bank of the United States… is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution… An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1803. ME 10:437
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

Hostility, Peace, Time, Parting

“It is time to remind Sharon that the star of David belongs to all Jews, not to his repulsive Government. His actions are staining the star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and Epstein, Mendelssohn and Mahler, Sergei Eisenstein and Billy Wilder, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps and now involved in killing Palestinians once again.”

Gerald Kaufman (1930–2017) British politician

Kaufman (April 2002) Speech to the House of Commons as cited in: Stuart Littlewood (14 january 2009). " Could the Rising Anger of British MPs Shake America’s Complacency?" http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=29784. Middle East Online. Retrieved on 18 january 2009. This speech related to Israel's controversial military operation codenamed Defensive Wall

People, World, Star, Time

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Life, Men, Education, Beauty

“Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

The History of England (1670), Book IV

Fight

“This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks on the south lawn of the White House (September 16, 2001) http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html 2000s, 2001

“The Führer confirms my impressions of yesterday. He would like an understanding with Great Britain. He knows that war with the British will be hard and bloody, and knows also that people everywhere today are averse to bloodshed.”

Franz Halder (1884–1972) German general

July 14, 1940 diary entry, quoted in "Their Finest Hour" - Page 230 - by Winston Churchill - History - 1986.
Sourced Encyclopedia of the Third Reich Louis L. Snyder

People, Understanding

“During the '70s, when the Cold War was still on, we invited Voznesensky and Yevtushenko to come here. We had very large readings for them. It was a way of kind of culturally thawing the Cold War.”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

"And the beat goes on", http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/09/DD158147.DTL San Francisco Chronicle, 2003-06-09. 2000s

Way, Reading

“Contemporary liberals think of rights as universal human attributes that can be respected anywhere, but here they show a characteristic disregard of history. Current understandings of human rights developed along with the modern nation-state. It was the nation-state that emancipated individuals from the communal ties of medieval times and created freedom as it has come to be known in the modern world. This was not done without enormous conflict and severe costs. Large-scale violence was an integral feature of the process. If the US became a modern nation only after a civil war, France did so only after the Napoleonic wars and Germany after two world wars and the Cold War. In Africa and the Balkans the struggle for nationhood has run in parallel with ethnic cleansing, while the welding of China into a nation that is underway today involves the suppression of Muslim minorities and something not far from genocide in Tibet.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Armed Missionaries: Missionary Liberalism, Liberal Imperialism (pp. 238-9)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

World, History, Communication, Understanding

“The problem that confronts most of us is whether the individual is merely the instrument of society or the end of society. Are you and I as individuals to be used, directed, educated, controlled, shaped to a certain pattern by society and government; or does society, the State, exist for the individual? Is the individual the end of society; or is he merely a puppet to be taught, exploited, butchered as an instrument of war? That is the problem that is confronting most of us. That is the problem of the world; whether the individual is a mere instrument of society, a plaything of influences to be moulded; or whether society exists for the individual.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1950s, The First and Last Freedom (1954)

World, Education, Problem

“Well, this is a strange reversal of the situation. The English are at loggerheads with the Americans. The Lansdowne Clique has coalesced with the Labour Party to obtain a swift acceptable peace for Germany. It seems that Lloyd George put pressure on him to this end. On the other hand we know that the Paris Senate has said that it will not come to the conference table to sue for peace but pursue the war with every means in its power. After your report I'll read you a confidential letter I have received from an agent in Holland…The agent…points to a possibility of coming to terms with England, which is obviously perturbed by American numerical superiority, and thinks we should have done better not to make peace overtures to America but to England…An agreement with England, to include a treaty with Japan to fling the Americans out of Europe. A European Monroe doctrine therefore to which I outlined to Hintze at Spa as the policy to be followed in future.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Georg Alexander von Müller's diary entry (29 October 1918), quoted in Georg Alexander von Müller, The Kaiser and His Court (London: Macdonald, 1961), pp. 416-417
1910s

Peace, Thinking, Reading, Future

“Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Daily News (18 February 1905)

World, Idea, Past, Dead

“In my own country, and perhaps in some others, the workers for the League of Nations are sometimes reproached with attaching too much importance to collective security and the forcible prevention of war. That only shows how short people's memories are in political affairs. As a matter of fact, during the first ten years of the League very little was said about these subjects. We dwelt on the social and humanitarian sides of the League. We urged disarmament and treaty revision. Great reliance — particularly in England — was placed not upon forcible action but upon public opinion. We preached — and, I am glad to say, preached successfully — the enormous importance of publicity in the actions of the League, so that the world might know not only what was being done but why it was being done at Geneva. We attached perhaps even too great importance to the conception that no nation would be so rash or so wicked as to set itself against the public opinion of the world.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

The Future of Civilization (1938)

People, World, Memory, Country

“A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On the new MPs elected in 1918; quoted by John Maynard Keynes in Economic Consequences of the Peace, Ch. 5
1910s

Men

“I fear that, eventually, we are all going to become collateral damage in the war on drugs, or terrorism, or whatever war is in vogue at the moment.”

James C. Nelson (1944–2006) Montana Supreme Court Justice

Concurring opinion in Montana v. Pelvit (No. 03-572)

Fear

“Wars and other kinds of murder have their beginning in the hatred of the enemy and in the unwillingness to be patient with evil. Their root is in intemperate self-love and in immoderate affection for temporal possessions. These conflicts are brought into this world because men do not trust the Son of God enough to abide by his commandments.”

Petr Chelčický book The Net of Faith

The Net of Faith (c. 1443)

Love, Men, God, World

“Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.”

Bertolt Brecht A Short Organum for the Theatre

¶ 55
A Short Organum for the Theatre (1949)

Communication

“The presence of U. S. troops in South Korea has been and remains the greatest deterrent to North Korean adventurism and a disruption of the current and longstanding peace on the Korean peninsula. And to repeat an important point: the absence of a formal peace treaty no more threatens this peace than the absence of a post-World War Two peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo threatens the peace between Russia and Japan.”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2010&month=12
Keeping the Peace: America in Korea, 1950–2010
December 2010
Imprimis
March 1, 2013
https://www.webcitation.org/6EyqabQdp?url=http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2010
March 9, 2013
yes

World, Peace

“They rode armed for war, curved swords at their side and the thick horn-and-sinew bows of mounted archers in cases at their knees.”

S.M. Stirling (1953) Canadian-American author, primarily of speculative fiction

The Scourge of God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scourge_of_God_(novel)

“He dropped, — more sullenly than wearily,
Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,
And none of us could kick him to his feet;
— Just blinked at my revolver, blearily;
— Didn't appear to know a war was on,
Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

The Dead-Beat

Stupidity, Appearance

“Firoz Tughlaq commanded his ‘fief-holders and officers to capture slaves whenever they were at war”. He had also instructed his Amils and Jagirdars to collect slave boys in place of revenue and tribute.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Shams Siraj Afif quoted in Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4

Boy

“There are people who go to the Hague for war crimes – I tell you this, some of the coaches nowadays should be up for crimes against Gaelic football.”

Pat Spillane (1955) Gaelic football player

Spillane on Jim McGuinness. His team won the 2012 All-Ireland. The Irish Times https://archive.is/20121208223707/www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2012/0827/1224323032489.html

People, Football

“As any military strategist knows, it's impossible to win a defensive warfare. Defensive war is doomed to defeat. To win a war, you have to launch an attack. You have to go on the offensive. You have to attack the enemy. You have to set him back on his heels. You have to take the initiative. You have to be positive. You have to attack and invade and overpower. You can't just sit there and try to ward him off while he attacks and invades, or he'll finally overpower you.”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Attack!

“Today, in the public imagination, “ethnic-cleansing” has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so). But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution—done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

Imagination, Understanding, Success

“Him did Galatia dare to provoke to war in lusty pride.”
Hunc Galatea vigens ausa est incessere bello.

Statius Silvae

iv, line 76 (tr. J. H. Mozley)
Silvae, Book I

“But the South became a closed society on the eve of the Civil War, and it became a closed society after the end of Reconstruction. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute for some time circulated a book edited by my late friend Mel Bradford, The Essays of Andrew Litell; was one of the Southerners who took their stand in 1931, I think it was. And one of those essays, written in 1934, praised lynching as a legitimate exercise of the reserve powers of the states when the government didn't fulfill its duty to take care of racist agitators. So the South was a closed society on the subject of race right up until World War II.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society

Books, World, Exercises, Thinking

“Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come.”

John Knowles book A Separate Peace

Mr. Hadley on war.
Source: A Separate Peace (1959), P. 191

People, Memory, Time

“No slave system has ever been able to continue to function on the slaves provided by its own biological reproduction because the rate of human reproduction is too slow and the expense from infant mortality and years of unproductive upkeep of the young make this prohibitively expensive. This relationship is one of the basic causes of the American Civil War, and was even more significant in destroying ancient Rome.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 9, Classical Civilization, p. 318

“Hush your highness, don't you breathe
No, baby, hold me in your arms, I'm shivering
But what's all this for?
If I was the battle, baby, you have won the war”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

"Hold Onto Me"
Song lyrics, America's Sweetheart (2004)

Baby

“Peace has an economic foundation to which too little attention has been given. No student can doubt that it was to a large extent the economic condition of Europe that drove those overburdened countries headlong into the World War. They were engaged in maintaining competitive armaments. If one country laid the keel of one warship, some other country considered it necessary to lay the keel of two warships. If one country enrolled a regiment, some other country enrolled three regiments. Whole peoples were armed and drilled and trained to the detriment of their industrial life, and charged and taxed and assessed until the burden could no longer be borne. Nations cracked under the load and sought relief from the intolerable pressure by pillaging each other. It was to avoid a repetition of such a catastrophe that our Government proposed and brought to a successful conclusion the Washing- ton Conference for the Limitation of Naval Armaments. We have been altogether desirous of an extension of this principle and for that purpose have sent our delegates to a preliminary conference of nations now sitting at Geneva. Out of that conference we expect some practical results. We believe that other nations ought to join with us in laying aside their suspicions and hatreds sufficiently to agree among themselves upon methods of mutual relief from the necessity of the maintenance of great land and sea forces. This can not be done if we constantly have in mind the resort to war for the redress of wrongs and the enforcement of rights. Europe has the League of Nations. That ought to be able to provide those countries with certain political guaranties which our country does not require. Besides this there is the World Court, which can certainly be used for the determination of all justifiable disputes. We should not underestimate the difficulties of European nations, nor fail to extend to them the highest degree of patience and the most sympathetic consideration. But we can not fail to assert our conviction that they are in great need of further limitation of armaments and our determination to lend them every assistance in the solution of their problems. We have entered the conference with the utmost good faith on our part and in the sincere belief that it represents the utmost good faith on their part. We want to see the problems that are there presented stripped of all technicalities and met and solved in a way that will secure practical results. We stand ready to give our support to every effort that is made in that direction.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

Life, People, World, Peace

“The family ties between hundreds of thousands of German families and their American relatives led many to think that America would never join a second war against Germany. Now that that has happened, many Germans still believe that America will never allow Bolshevism to conquer and destroy Germany. Recent events have proven how false and dangerous this idea is. One has to be foolish or irredeemably stupid to believe that anything good can come to Europe from the land of presumed opportunity. That that did not happen after the First World War, and will not happen after the second. The Jews have made America what it is today: a nation raped by the Jews, a nation whose 130,000,000 people of many colors and races have been forced into helping the Jews achieve world domination! The descendants of European immigrants do not govern the United States of America today. The foreign and domestic policies of the country are made by the Jews and their lackeys. The American people wanted peace, but were maneuvered into war by Delano Roosevelt, a tool of World Jewry who himself has Jewish blood in his veins. It was the same in World War I, when Woodrow Wilson, also a tool of the Jews, maneuvered it into the war.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Der Stürmer, 1944

People, Stupidity, World, Family

“In the final analysis, The Better Angels of Our Nature is an inflated political tract that misuses data and rewrites history in accord with its author’s clear ideological biases, while finding ideology at work only in the actions of his opponents. […] Small wonder, then, that the message of Better Angels pleases so well the editors of the New York Times and the large U. S. permanent-war establishment. It is regrettable that despite its manifest problems, the book has bamboozled so many other people who should know better.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Herman and Peterson (2012), Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.12/PDFs/0812.PinkerCrit.pdf, pp. 92-93. 2010s

People, Books, Angels, History

“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers - Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices. You're going to challenge. You're going to say, "Why not?". You're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here's the deal: These are your choices, they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all of the odds against you?" And Mao Zedong said, you know, "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine." And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things and you don't have to follow other peoples choices and paths. Ok? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war, you lay out your own path, you figure out what's right for you. You don't let external definition define how good you are internally, you fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”

Anita Dunn (1958) American political strategist

Speech at the Washington National Cathedral for St. Andrews Episcopal High School's (of Bethesda Maryland) graduation on June 5, 2009. It was broadcast on the Glenn Beck Show, Oct 15, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi1zg2NOCn8 http://www.saes.org/academics/lower_school/newsletter.aspx?StartDate=6/2/2009

People, Thinking, Fight

“In his response, Foreign Minister Jack Straw said that September 11 had not come in response to any Western attack, and was itself in part responsible for the Iraq War. Straw seems unaware that according to the September 11 Commission report, al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians. Bin Laden had wanted to move the operation up in response to Sharon's threatening visit to the Temple Mount, and again in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, which left 4,000 persons homeless. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad argued in each case that the operation just was not ready. As for Straw's contention that September 11 caused the Iraq war, he should be reminded that Paul O'Neil reported that the very first Bush cabinet meeting he attended, in late January 2001, was "all about Iraq" and that the 9/11 Commission found no evidence for operational cooperation between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda.”

Juan Cole (1952) American scholar

On September 11, 2001 Source: http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/Documents/ColeLondon.html, Juan Cole, Informed Comment Blog http://www.juancole.com/, July 08, 2005

Support, Parting, Personality

“The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valour and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war — that it is fought to be won — has been forgotten.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

Family, Star, Courage, Effort

“The unknown is the governing condition of war.”

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) French soldier and military theorist

Source: Precepts and Judgments (1919), p. 209

“Jones, Howard (2003). Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195052862.”

Madame Nhu (1924–2011) First lady of South Vietnam

Sources

Death, Universe

“I walk where once the grass was green
And mourn the lark that sings no more
What bird could sing whose eyes have seen
Broken blossoms on the field of war?”

Tom Springfield (1934) English musician, songwriter and record producer

Song Broken Blossoms.

Bird, Grass, Singing

““We have a war to fight. You don’t understand. We fight in God’s name.”
“I understand just fine,” Nyx said.”

Kameron Hurley (1980) American writer

Source: God’s War (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 235).

God, Understanding, Fight

“"It is an evil, sir, an unmitigated evil," Lincoln said. "I shall never forget the group of chained Negroes I saw going down the river to be sold close to a quarter of a century ago. Never was there so much misery, all in one place. If your secession triumphs, the South will be a pariah among nations." "We shall be recognized as what we are, a nation among nations," Lee returned. "And, let me repeat, my being here is a sign secession has triumphed. What I would seek to do now, subject to the ratification of my superiors, is suggest terms to halt the war between the United States and Confederate States." Lincoln refused to call Lee's country by its proper name. As a small measure of revenge, Lee put extra weight on that name. Lincoln sighed. This was the moment he had tried to evade, but there was no evading it, not with the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia in his parlor. "Name your terms, General," he said in a voice full of ashes.”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 176-177

Revenge, Evil, Country, Forgetting

“Lulu made most of his telephone calls. He made this one himself, on a special line that didn't pass through her desk. It went straight from his office to the War Department. Men checked twice a day to make sure the damnyankees didn't tap it. It rang only once before the Chief of the General Staff picked it up. "Forrest speaking." "Featherston," Jake said, and then, "Blackbeard." He hung up. There. It was done. The die was cast. Whatever was going to happen would happen… starting tomorrow morning, early tomorrow morning. Summer had just come in. Jake worked through the rest of June 21. He ate supper, then went right on working through the night. Lulu brought him cup after cup of coffee. After a while, yawning, she went home to bed. He worked on, behind blackout curtains that kept light from leaking out of the Gray House and showing where it was from the air. June 21 passed through to June 22. All that coffee made Jake's eart thud and soured his stomach. He gulped a Bromo-Seltzer and went on. At a quarter past three, the drone of airplane engines and the thunder of distant artillery- not distant enough; damn those Yankee robbers!”

Harry Turtledove book American Empire: The Victorious Opposition

made him whoop for sheer glee. He'd waited so long. Now his day was here.
Source: American Empire: The Victorious Opposition (2003), p. 534.

Men, Home, Coffee, Light

“As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close. So it's just one of those recurring things… I hope this doesn't come true in our country. Maybe the film will waken people to the situation. … When I wrote it [Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith], Iraq didn't exist… We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We didn't think of him as an enemy at that time. We were going after Iran and using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in Vietnam… The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable…”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

"Star Wars Raises Questions On U.S. Policy" WBZTV CBS 4 Boston (2005)

People, Hope, History, Star

“I cannot agree with you that the money in Spain has been ineffectual in producing the better hope which now exists…I still think that our opinions at the beginning and in the progress of the Spanish contest were well warranted by such data as we then had to reason upon…But I cannot say that as things have turned out, contrary certainly to any expectations, the event of the Spanish war has not been both honourable and advantageous to this country.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lady Grenville (27 October 1813), quoted in E. A. Smith, Lord Grey. 1764-1845 (Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 174.
1810s

Money, Hope, Thinking, Country

“Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"The Craft" - interview with Daniel Whiston, Engine Comics (January 2005)

Men, People, World

“They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that's what happened.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

This appears to be a variant of a widely disseminated Republican joke with no published attribution of its authorship to Buckley. Mark Hatfield, as quoted in The Condition of Republicanism (1968) by Nick Thimmesch, p. 65 They told me if I voted for Goldwater we'd be at war in Vietnam in six months — and I did and we were. Anonymous voter, as quoted in It All Comes Back to Me Now : Character Portraits from the "Golden Apple" (2001) by William O'Shaughnessy, p. 85 Buckley did say this on the Firing Line episode "Vietnam: Pull Out? Stay In? Escalate?" According to the transcript here http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/programView2.php?programID=22, he says "...if someone told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we would escalate the war, I did and we have." Misattributed Variant: They told me if I voted for Goldwater in 1964, that we'd have more war and higher prices. Well, I did, and we do.

“Who is it climbs the summit of the road?
Only the beggar bumming his dark load.
Who was it cried to see the falling star?
Only the landless soldier lost in war.
And did a thousand years go by in vain?
And does another thousand start again?”

Alun Lewis (1915–1944) Welsh poet

"The Mahratta Ghats", line 22; p. 44.
Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (1945)

Star

“The US — its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing — is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonising about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

"Folly of the progressive fairytale," The Observer (2008-09-08)

Law, Nostalgia

“The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Q&A with Hunger Games Author Suzanne Collins, July 31, 2013, Hannah Trierweiler Hudson, Scholastic.com http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/qa-hunger-games-author-suzanne-collins,

Life, Hunger, People, Game

“The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is 'Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand". -Lemony Snicket”

Daniel Handler book The Miserable Mill

The Miserable Mill (2000)

World, Housing

“So Dubya goes to war because god told him to. There's a woman down in Texas who bashed in her kid's skulls for the same reason.”

Ed Krebs (1951) American photographer and musician

Had Enough Religious Bullshit

God

“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

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

Remarks at a White House luncheon (26 June 1954) Quoted in Churchill Urges Patience in Coping with Red Dangers, The New York Times, June 27, 1954 http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00A10FE3458117A93C5AB178DD85F408585F9, Has been falsely attributed to Otto von Bismarck. But Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, speaking of this quote, noted that Churchill actually said, "Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war." Four years later, during a visit to Australia, Harold Macmillan said the words usually—and wrongly—attributed to Churchill: “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” Credit: Harold Macmillan. Post-war years (1945–1955) Source: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/quotes-falsely-attributed/

“This was the greatest invasion in this war so far – probably the greatest in human history – and the sea was crowded to the horizon with uncountable ships, but we were as lost and ineffective as babes in the wood.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

History, Sea

“[O'Brien's heroes are] William Butler Yeats, Michael Collins, André Malraux, Maurice Ravel, Giorgio Di Cirico, Laurence Olivier and Max Schmeling. And of course the great Douglas Baader, the war pilot who had no legs. When he was captured by the Germans, they allowed the British to parachute his steel legs. And he escaped! So, I don't care about The Merry Wives of Windsor, but talk to me about Douglas Baader!”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

“The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.
We cannot honestly regret their extermination, but we at least do justice to the manly characteristics possessed, according to their lights and education, by the early Redskins of America.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

Saturday Pioneer (20 December 1890)
The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (1890 and 1891)

Love, Age, Education, Justice

“Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.”

Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) English poet, author and literary critic

Festubert, 1916 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57255/festubert-1916 (1921)

Sadness, Tree, Strong, Passion

“Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs… They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves. … For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

[David, Brooks, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/837uvzrs.asp?pg=2, Saddam's Brain, Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002, May 24, 2011]
2000s

People, World, Peace, Problem

“The atrocities are, for me, the most horrible part of the accusation in this trial. They thought that I took it lightly or laughed about it or some such nonsense, in court. That is definitely a mistake. I am the type of person who is naturally against such things and my own psychological reaction is to laugh or smile in the face of adversity. Perhaps that explains my attitude in court. Besides, I was not to blame for these horrors. It's not just that I am a hard man because of my long experience in the army and in politics. It's true that I saw plenty in the First World War and during the air raids and at the front in this war. But I was always a person who felt the suffering of others. To paint me as an unfeeling ogre who laughs in court at the atrocities is stupid.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (24 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Stupidity, World, Smile, Nature

“Mr. Duff Cooper, landing at New York, cools his mind by blowing off about a forthcoming revolt of the German Army and a return to monarchy in Germany, a Holy Roman Empire, I suppose, leading that new Crusade of which the Pope has been talking about recent against anti-God Russia. But quite a lot of radical people in the world, in spite of the folly, stupidity and brutality of the Stalin–Molotov attack on Finland, are averse from this idea of a religious war against Socialism and Atheism.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for? (1940)

God, People, Stupidity, World

“Men have their choice in this world. They can be angels, or they may be demons. In the apocalyptic vision, John describes a war in heaven. You have only to strip that vision of its gorgeous Oriental drapery, divest it of its shining and celestial ornaments, clothe it in the simple and familiar language of common sense, and you will have before you the eternal conﬂict between right and wrong, good and evil, liberty and slavery, truth and falsehood, the glorious light of love, and the appalling darkness of human selﬁshness and sin. The human heart is a seat of constant war… Just what takes place in individual human hearts, often takes place between nations, and between individuals of the same nation.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

As quoted in Maurice S. Lee (2009), The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass. Cambridge University Press, p. 50; Thomson, Conyers & Dawson (2009). The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 84

Love, Men, Truth, World

“War means fighting, and fighting means killing.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877) Confederate Army general

As quoted in May I Quote You, General Forrest? by Randall Bedwell.
1860s

Fight

“Does he [A N Wilson] really believe that there is no nostalgia for the triumphant days of the Third Reich among that proud and valorous race, or that they have forgiven and forgotten that in two great wars the English-speaking people beat the hell out of them, humiliated them, conquered them?”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

The Europe Fiasco. p. 76.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

People, Hell, Nostalgia

“One of its [the First World War’s] most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe … This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 173.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

World, Soul

“We wondered why we ever thought there was, during the Cold War, any serious danger of Russia conquering the world when they couldn't even deliver the scenery for The Tempest.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 29 : Avoiding Utopia

World

“Before the War you took your secretary to Paris and called her your wife. Now, in order to wriggle through the tax-gatherer's net, you take your wife to Paris and call her your secretary.”

Stormont Mancroft, 2nd Baron Mancroft (1914–1987) British politician

A Chinaman in My Bath

“The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Freedom Under Siege http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/freedom_under_siege.php (1987). 1980s

People, World

“We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam, it must have been Saddam. We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. …. This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism.”

John Lehman (1942) American banker and government official

Ibid.

World

“The Rumsfeld-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U. S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

2000s, Welcome to the Big Darkness (2003)

Stupidity, World, Country

“We should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again.”

Joe Klein (1946) American journalist

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/337996

“Nothing is more certain than that war promotes science and increases comforts. Utopia may mean no more wars, but universal peace and plenty will never reign until at least one more war raises mankind to a plane of such comfort and ease that nobody on either side of a frontier can even imagine the possibility of resorting to arms. Comfort creates wars and comfort may someday end them.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Peace, Imagination, Universe, Science

“It is in the highest degree likely that the North will not be able to subdue the south, and it is no doubt certain that if the Southern union is established as an independent state it would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures but the operations of the war have as yet been too indecisive to warrant an acknowledgement of the southern union.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Sir Austen Henry Layard (20 October 1861) on the American Civil War, quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 552.
1860s

Indecision

“What is, however, expected of intellect is that it should show a most proper way to achieve its end, be it the hunting of a beast, inventing of an instrument, laying down the foundations of a new system of economy, setting up a new form or government, kindling a war, or making peace. All these activities of man depend upon his intellectual ability. Emotions creeping in will only spoil them.”

Muhammad Qutb (1919–2014) Egyptian Islamist writer and scholar

Source: Islam: the Misunderstood Religion, Chapter 7, p. 146.

Peace, Way, Dependency

“I carried out my purpose: War and Peace, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and so forth. Would you believe it? Something is gained in translation; the originals are even more depressing and soporific than translations. I’m not sure what purpose Russian fiction has, but it can’t be entertainment.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XIX : Something is gained in translation—, p. 166

Peace

“And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority - all authority - especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Preface (page XXIII)
The Great War for Civilization (2005)

Thinking

“(Carmine Crocco) The so-called "General" Crocco, who played an important part as a brigand and Bourbonist leader in the partisan war of 1860-61, was an escaped convict, with thirty offences, ranging from petty larceny to murder, registered against him in the books of the Neapolitan tribunals. He pillaged both Bourbonists and Liberals with strict impartiality.”

Eliakim Littell (1797–1870) United States editor

The Living Age, Volume 90, Littell, Son and Co., 1866, p. 358-359

Books, Parting

“A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind" question is more urgent than most of us expected. The Western world, as a concept, is dead and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

It's the Demography, Stupid (2006)

World, History, Question, Victory

“New Song rapidly accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising against and occupation army in 1640 during the Reapers' War: "Setze jutges d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat" ("Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the liver of a hanged man"). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could pronounce this barrage of fricatives.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Page 11
Barcelona (1992)

“Integration of races of totally disparate origins and culture is one of the great myths of our time. It has never worked throughout history. The United States lost its only real opportunity of solving its racial problem when it failed after the Civil War to partition the old Confederacy into a "South Africa" and a "Liberia."”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Remark to an American visitor shortly after Powell's return to London from his first visit to the United States in October 1967, as quoted in Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970), p. 341
1960s

History, Problem, Time

“And as a matter of fact Rumsfeld, Now that I think back, Without 9/11 you couldn't have a war in Iraq.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The Cause of Death
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

Thinking

“IV. We think timid counsels in such a crisis calculated to prove perilous, and probably disastrous. It is the duty of a Government so wantonly, wickedly assailed by Rebellion as ours has been to oppose force to force in a defiant, dauntless spirit. It cannot afford to temporize with traitors nor with semi-traitors. It must not bribe them to behave themselves, nor make cheat fair promises in the hope of disarming their causeless hostility. Representing a brave and high-spirited people, it can afford to forfeit anything else better than its own self-respect, or their admiring confidence. For our Government even to seek, after war has been made on it, to dispel the affected apprehensions of armed traitors that their cherished privileges may be assailed by it, is to invite insult and encourage hopes of its own downfall. The rush to arms of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, is the true answer at once to the Rebel raids of John Morgan and the traitorous sophistries of Beriah Magoffin.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

1860s, The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

Hostility, People, Hope, Confidence

“The weak, sensual, pleasure-loving French. You know, not going to war because they’re all still in bed at two in the afternoon, with the sheets coiled about their knees, lying, there scratching themselves, smoking a Gauloise inside a Gitane, sweating Nice sancerre. Before one of them sloughs off the sheets to pad around the kitchen naked. No, not naked, naked from the waist down. To emphasise their nakedity. Picking up yesterday's croissant crumbs with their sweaty feet. Slashing yesterday's paintings.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Monster (2004)

Love, Pleasure, Lying, Painting

“We have to remind ourselves of this at every moment: that we are in a war, a cold war as they call it; a war where there is no front line, no continuous bombardment, but where the two adversaries — this tiny champion of the Caribbean and the immense imperialist hyena — are face to face and aware that one of them is going to end up dead in the fight.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Mobilising for Invasion (1961)

Fight, Dead

“I have been reading of late, most carefully, oh such an exciting mass of Anarchist Literature sent to me by old Emma Goldman who is my Prime Minister & chief Political Philosopher! and every week I get the anarchist paper from Avenue A New York City and also the ‘Bulletin of Information’ from the Anarchists of Barcelona. This latter pamphlet I am carefully keeping; because it is not so much concerned with the war as with their experiment in Catalonia of organizing their life on Anarchist lines and getting rid of all Dictatorship & of the ‘Sovereign State’.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Letter to his sister (24 September 1938), published in The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Philippa Powys (1996), edited by Anthony Head p. 106

Life, Literature, Reading

““Neither War nor Violent Death,” Morgenes had written, “have anything uplifting about them, yet they are the candle to which Humanity flies again and again, as complacently as the lowly moth. He who has been upon a battlefield, and who is not blinded by popular conceptions, will confirm that on this ground Mankind seems to have created a Hell on Earth out of sheer impatience, rather than waiting for that original to which—if the priests are correct—most of us will eventually be ushered.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 20, “The Shadow of the Wheel” (p. 302).

Death, Hell, Waiting

“Transliteration of Hebrew statement meaning "The UN—Blah!", quoted in Israel : From War to Peace?: The First Hundred Years (2000) by Efraim Karsh, p. 40”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

Um-Shmoom.

Peace, Quotes

“We always support peace… and we will keep supporting peace for all people. In Sri Lanka we also fought thirty years of war against terrorists. So the whole development process, the economy went down. We suffered for thirty years but now we have peace for the last four years. In 2009 we managed to eradicate terrorism. Though we have eradicated terrorism, now we have to face the international community, which is pressurizing us. Now our issue is that some of the countries are criticizing though there are no bombs blasting in our country. Every March or every six months in Geneva we are facing a confrontation with these countries. Some of the Western countries are bringing resolutions in the Human Rights Commission.”

Mahinda Rajapaksa (1945) Prime Minister of Sri Lanka

Quoted in DNA-India, "Sri Lankan president Mahindra Rajpaksa seeks more time to deal with the Tamilian issue" http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report-sri-lankan-president-mahindra-rajpaksa-seeks-more-time-to-deal-with-the-tamilian-issue-1948078, January 9, 2014.

People, Peace, Communication, Support

“Wars are generally a rich man's affair and a poor man's fight.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Sanctuary City Mayor Trashes An AMERICAN Hero, Robert E. Lee, https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/sanctuary-city-mayor-trashes-an-american-hero-robert-e-lee/" The Abbeville Institute, May 25, 2017 2010s, 2017

Fight

“Bombardment by a new device of centres essential to the British war effort. The action was long delayed, but who can deny that the moment selected for it was chosen most appropriately from the military point of view? Germany has more secret weapons than one.”

William Joyce (1906–1946) British fascist and propaganda broadcaster

Broadcast, German European Service in English, 17 September 1944.
Refers to the first attack by the Vergeltungswaffe-1, or "reprisal weapon".

Secret, Effort

Quotes about war page 27

Quotes about war
page 27