“The use of force is non-moral, that is to say, it is good or bad depending on the motive behind its use and the effects of it application. To reason by analogy from the justification of the use of force to a justification of war is to endanger sound decisions and may lead to disastrous consequences.”

— Kirby Page

"What is War?" (1924)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The use of force is non-moral, that is to say, it is good or bad depending on the motive behind its use and the effects…" by Kirby Page?

Kirby Page photo

Kirby Page 248

American clergyman 1890–1957

Related quotes

“Justification is the work of Christ for us; sanctification the work of the Spirit in us; justification is perfect at once; sanctification is progressive; justification is before sanctification, and sanctification is the fruit of justification; consequently the evidence of our justification is our sanctification.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 362.

“The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
Context: The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men. Pacifists have sometimes evaded that truth as making too great a concession to Mars, as seeming to imply (which it does not in fact) that in order to abolish war, men must cease to be noble.
Base motives are, of course, among those which make up the forces that produce war. Base motives are among those which get great cathedrals built and hospitals constructed-contractors' profit-seeking, the vested interests of doctors and clergy. But Europe has not been covered by cathedrals because contractors wanted to make money, or priests wanted jobs.

“All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced' upon the Government. The Government will not use force unless force is used against it.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Source: 1860s, Speech in Independence Hall (1861)

“I'm sickened by the way that the delivery of so-called humanitarian aid is once again being used as a justification — or cover — for war.”

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

Salon interview (2001)

“When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Saga, Vol. 1

“The Higgs boson is an essential part of the analogy to the Meissner effect in superconductivity that leads us to an excellent understanding of the masses of the electroweak gauge bosons W± and Z0 as consequences of electroweak symmetry breaking.”

Chris Quigg (1944) American physicist

Visions- the coming revolutions of particle physics. http://xxx.uni-augsburg.de/pdf/hep-ph/0204075v1 2002, p. 5.

“We guard against the forces of anti-Christian aggression, which may attack us from without, and the forces of ignorance and fear which may corrupt us from within.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Speech at Madison Square Garden, October 28, 1940
1940s

“In other words, the fact that the criterion we happen to use has a fine ancestry of highbrow statistical theorems does not justify its use. Such justification must come from empirical evidence that it works.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

Source: Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product,1931, p. 18

“Prayer is decisive element of victory. Wars are won by those who have managed to attract from elsewhere, from the skies, the mysterious forces of the invisible world and to secure their support. These mysterious forces are the souls of the dead, the souls of our ancestors, who once were, like us, linked to our clods, to our furrows, who died for the defense of this land and are still linked today to it by the memory of their lives and by us, their sons, their grandsons, their great grandsons. But, above the souls of the dead, there is God. Once these forces are attracted, they are of considerable power, they defend us, they give us courage, will, all the elements necessary to victory and which make us win. They bring in panic and terror among the enemies, paralyse their activity. In the last analysis, victories do not depend only on material preparation, on the material forces of the belligerents, but on their power to secure the support of spiritual forces. The fairness and the morality of actions and the fervent, insistent call for them in the form of rite and collective prayer attract such forces.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion

Related topics