“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.”
"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.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 120
Russian writer 1918–2008Related quotes
“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
In response to journalist for his views on the future of mankind at his 70th birthday (16 April 1959)
1961, UN speech
Context: Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
Letter addressed to Hitler. 23 July 1939 (Collected Works, vol. 70, pp. 20–21), Quoted from Koenraad Elst: Return of the Swastika (2007). (Also in https://web.archive.org/web/20100310135408/http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/fascism/gandhihitler.html)
1930s
Interviewed in the documentary series The Civil War, 1990
Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 170
“The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war.”
Nobel Lecture for The Nobel Peace Prize 1962 (11 December 1963).
1940s-1960s
“The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic.”
James Hinton, Philosophy and Religion: Selections from the Manuscripts of the Late James Hinton, ed. Caroline Haddon, (2nd ed., London: 1884), [//books.google.com/books?id=DpxRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA267 p. 267].
Widely misattributed on the internet to Dewey, who actually attributes it to Hinton in Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: 1922), [//books.google.com/books?id=Ws0RAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA115 p. 115].
Misattributed