“War kills wealth as it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate gold any more than soldiers.”
Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi
Context: We cannot say out of what historical conjunctions the final tempests will issue, nor by what fancy names the interchangeable ideals imposed on men will be known in that moment. But the cause — that will perhaps everywhere be fear of the nations' real freedom. What we do know is that the tempests will come.
Armaments will increase every year amid dizzy enthusiasm. The relentless torture of precision seizes me. We do three years of military training; our children will do five, they will do ten. We pay two thousand million francs a year in preparation for war; we shall pay twenty, we shall pay fifty thousand millions. All that we have will be taken; it will be robbery, insolvency, bankruptcy. War kills wealth as it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate gold any more than soldiers. We no longer know how to count; we no longer know anything. A billion — a million millions — the word appears to me printed on the emptiness of things. It sprang yesterday out of war, and I shrink in dismay from the new, incomprehensible word.
There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war. All living forces will be absorbed by it; it will monopolize all discovery, all science, all imagination.
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Henri Barbusse 197
French novelist 1873–1935Related quotes
“Any child who cannot do long division by himself does not deserve to smoke.”
"Digital Clocks and Pocket Calculators: Spoilers of Youth" (p. 84).
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“Alliance does not mean love, any more than war means hate.”
Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948)
Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 15.
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 14; translated by W. K. Marriot
“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”
Source: 1910s, Why Men Fight https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Men_Fight (1917), pp. 178-179
Context: Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 4(f), pg. 774.
(Buch I) (1867)