WAR QUOTES VIII

quotations about war


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What happened in World War II was what happened in war generally, and that was whatever the initiating cause, and however clear the moral reason is for the war in which one side looks better than the other, by the time the war ends both sides have been engaged in evil.

HOWARD ZINN
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Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches, 1963-2009


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War is a fevered god
who takes alike
maiden and king and clod.

HILDA DOOLITTLE

"Telesila"

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War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to "feel good" about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.

ADRIENNE RICH

What is Found There

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We are now in the midst of our first television war ... the television environment [is] total and therefore invisible. Along with the computer, it has altered every phase of the American vision and identity. The television war has meant the end of the dichotomy between civilian and military. The public is now a participant in every phase of the war, and the main actions of the war are now being fought in the American home itself.

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

War and Peace in the Global Village

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You wouldn't believe how many I've seen coming up the road here. But precious few going back. Well, that's what war is, I believe. I always try to tell myself they're still there -- I mean, wherever it was they went -- but you know and I know there's a lot that have gone to stay.

GENE WOLFE

The Claw of the Conciliator

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It's hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require.

PETER BEINART

"How America Shed the Taboo Against Preventive War", The Atlantic, April 21, 2017


War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernisation and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable.... What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy ... when left to itself.

ERIC J. HOBSBAWM

London Observer, May 26, 1968

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The monk that invented gunpowder did as much to stop war as did all the sermons of his brethren.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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Every war involves a greater or less relapse into barbarism. War, indeed, in its details, is the essence of inhumanity. It dehumanizes. It may save the state, but it destroys the citizen.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

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War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist.

M. F. K. FISHER

introduction to revised edition, How to Cook a Wolf

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In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

JAMES MADISON

speech at Constitutional Convention, June 29, 1787

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War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.

IAN HAY

The First Hundred Thousand

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Superiority in war ... cannot surely be a proof of justice, since wars are often unjustly undertaken, and successfully, though wickedly, carried on and concluded.

ARISTOTLE

Politics

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We don't call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny: those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor.

MICHAEL WALZER

Just and Unjust Wars

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A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.

ELIE WIESEL

Nobel Lecture, December 10, 1986

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The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.

HOWARD ZINN

Terrorism and War

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War is not pretty from any angle, and the most vulnerable organ in the body is the brain.

FRANK LAWLIS

PTSD Breakthrough: The Revolutionary, Science-Based Compass RESET Program


Military arrangement, and movements in consequence, like the mechanism of a clock, will be imperfect and disordered by the want of a part.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

letter to the President of Congress, December 23, 1777

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So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.

WILLIAM JAMES

The Moral Equivalent of War

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We may have hell if we have war, and we may have hell if we have peace. But if we have no vision for what we do, we have hell anyway.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

The Air-line to Liberty: A Prospectus for All Nations

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