Gene, on the enemy.
Source: A Separate Peace (1959), P. 196
“She saw that in all wars, the first stage was to dehumanize the enemy, reduce the enemy to a lower level so that he might be killed without compunction. When the enemy was not human to begin with, the task was easier.”
Source: Short fiction, Hardfought (1983), p. 76
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Greg Bear 38
American writer best known for science fiction 1951Related quotes

“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not when the enemy is me.”
This includes a common paraphrase of a statement which originates with military strategist Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke: "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)

To Leon Goldensohn, February 4, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

“When you begin to see that your enemy is suffering, that is the beginning of insight.”
Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
On Palestinian suicide bombings.
Source: World Politics Watch http://www.worldpoliticswatch.com/article.aspx?id=395, 7 December 2006.

"How to Organise Competition?" (27 December 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/dec/25.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 411, 414.
1910s

A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Context: Throughout human history, when confronted with what was deemed a deadly enemy, the fixed human response has been to gather more rocks, muskets, cannons, and now nuclear bombs. While nuclear weapons have no military utility — indeed they are not weapons but instruments of genocide-this essential truth is obscured by the notion of an "evil enemy". The "myth of the other", the stereotyping and demonizing of human beings beyond recognition, is still pervasive and now exacts inordinate economic, psychologic, and moral costs. The British physicist P. M. S. Blackett anticipated this state of paranoia: "Once a nation bases its security on an absolute weapon, such as the atom bomb, it becomes psychologically necessary to believe in an absolute enemy". The imagined enemy is eventually banished from the human family and reduced to an inanimate object whose annihilation loses all moral dimension.