“I feel I am privileged to express a hope. The hope is this: that we shall have peace throughout the world: that we shall abolish wars, and settle all international differences at the conference table: that we shall abolish all atom and hydrogen bombs, before they abolish us first.”
In response to journalist for his views on the future of mankind at his 70th birthday (16 April 1959)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Charlie Chaplin 75
British comic actor and filmmaker 1889–1977Related quotes
"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999).
Context: At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 231.
1770s, Letter to Robert Pleasants (1773)
We'll Never Conquer Space (1960)
Context: We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face-to-face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints.
“We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France.”
As quoted in Wellington and His Friends (1965) by Gerald Wellesley, 7th Duke of Wellington, p. 138, and in The Economist (16 June 2005) http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4079435
“Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man.”
Fact and Fiction (1961), Part IV, Ch. 10: "Can War Be Abolished?", p. 276
1960s
