“No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.”

Diary (4 January 1861)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)
Context: Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free States alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation.

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. xii-xiii; Cited in: Samuel Smiles Industrial biography; iron-workers and tool-makers http://books.google.com/books?id=5trBcaXuazgC&pg=PA104, (1864) p. 104

The Clerk's Vision (1949)
Context: The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.
And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don't wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation. I do not loudly plead for leniency, nor wish to save myself or anyone else. And for all that I don't do and for all that they do to us, I neither ask forgiveness nor forgive. Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I'm guilty. Am I guilty? I'm innocent. (I'm innocent when I'm guilty, guilty when I'm innocent. I'm guilty when … but that is another song. Another song? It's all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit.

Source: The Concrete Blonde

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

An Humble Attempt To Promote Explicit Agreement And Visible Union Of God’s People In Extraordinary Prayer For The Revival Of Religion And The Advancement Of Christ’s Kingdom On Earth from Edwards, Jonathan, The works of Jonathan Edwards (Vol. 2, p. 278). Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1974.

The Two Pioneers
1890s, Quintessence Of Ibsenism (1891; 1913)

Source: Birdsong

Conclusion
1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)