“I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners— two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.”

Holidays in Hell (1989)

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P. J. O'Rourke185

American journalist 1947

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“Wars fought exclusively on foreign soil do have marginally higher real output growth than peacetime periods, but real growth during all other wars is sharply below peacetime levels. Evidence for foreign and domestic wars is consistent with monetarist, fiscalist, and mixed theories of wartime booms.”

Bryan Caplan (1971) American political scientist

[Journal of International Money and Finance, 21, 2, April 2002, 145–162, How does war shock the economy?, 10.1016/S0261-5606(01)00046-8]

“During the war we had to stop producing the everyday things which we need in peacetime. We had to concentrate on war production and the bare necessities of existence. The natural result is that to-day we are short of the things which we need. … You may ask why cannot we get what we want from abroad? The answer is that we can only get it if we can pay for it. Before the war many of the things which we got from abroad—food and raw material—were paid for by the interest on foreign investments, and by services rendered by us to people in other countries. During the war we had to sell our foreign investments to pay for the arms, food, and other things we needed. Apart from any temporary relief we may get by loans from our friends across the Atlantic, we can only buy from abroad now if we can pay by exporting goods or rendering services.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (3 March 1946), quoted in The Times (4 March 1946), p. 4
Prime Minister

“I'm okay with a professional military during peacetime, but the moment a vote to go to war occurs, the draft should automatically be reinstated. We need to make war as difficult as we can to declare. You've got to bring the war home.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 14 (p. 268)
Context: At the end of the Vietnam War, I was actively involved in the Stop-the-Draft movement. I've done a full 180-degree turn today. [... ] As long as we have a professional military, it's not going to touch that many Americans whose attitude is, "Well, they all volunteered, they're there because they want to be." The fact is, a professional military is now the strong arm of our president and corporate America, and the gun can be pulled out of the holster far too easily. It creates an atmosphere where the majority of the fighting men are poor people. Trying to improve in the military is their only way of getting a college education down the line. The rich kids, even a great majority of the middle class kids, are not serving.
I'm okay with a professional military during peacetime, but the moment a vote to go to war occurs, the draft should automatically be reinstated. We need to make war as difficult as we can to declare. You've got to bring the war home.

“I get an obsession that everybody is out for what they can get during the war and it makes me sick.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lady Dickinson (28 November 1917), quoted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-1937 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 79.
1910s

“War is the health of the State and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

¶2. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), p. 27. <br class="br">"The State" (1918), II

“Why hasn't the administration made more of the U. N. Inspector's report that says Saddam Hussein was dismantling his missile and W. M. D. sites before and during the war?”

Jeff Gannon (1957) American journalist

June 15, 2004
Questions asked at Press Conferences

“This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war.... It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

The Fall of Tobruk, 20 June 1942.
The Second World War, Volume IV : The Hinge of Fate (1951) Chapter XII. pp. 343-4.
The Second World War (1939–1945)

“The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

The Second World War, Volume II : Their Finest Hour (1949) Chapter XXX (Ocean Peril). p. 529.
Post-war years (1945–1955)

“The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 19

“I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it. We only talk about one side of it. But there's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

“I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners— two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.”

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P. J. O'Rourke185

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