The State thrives on war – unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed – expands on it, glories in it.
You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.
He was a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser, show me a hero and I’ll show you a corpse.
It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.
Earthshaking fire from the center of the Earth will cause tremors around the New City. Two great rocks will war for a long time, then Arethusa will redden a new river.
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.
In time of peace prepare for war.
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
There is no alternative to peace. There is no sense to go to war.
We’ve killed a million Iraqis since the start of the Gulf war – mostly by blocking humanitarian aid.
The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.
You can propose marriage naked or in handcuffs, but no one is going to agree to forsake all others for a man in shorts. You can’t declare war in shorts or deliver a eulogy in shorts.
Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism ‘inevitably’ caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.
In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.
War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it’s so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are ‘others’ whom we can legitimately make war upon.
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
As I was writing ‘The Shock Doctrine’, I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina.
Conquered, we conquer.
We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.
In many… cases, of course, the Arab Spring has brought about instability rather than greater stability. And rather than bringing about government that is more representative and more responsive to the people, you’re seeing, frankly, the opposite, or you’re seeing all-out war.
There’s some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the ’60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba.
War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.
When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.
From the moment this war began, there was, for this state, only one policy possible, neutrality.
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.
Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.
A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.
I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.
War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.
If our most highly qualified General Staff officers had been told to work out the most nonsensical high level organization for war which they could think of, they could not have produced anything more stupid that that which we have at present.
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn’t easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
When the Bangladesh war happened, people in Pakistan who did not support it were called unpatriotic. My father was in the jail at that time, and a lot of those who knew my family used to call us children of a traitor.
The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of common man.
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.
For millennia, men have enslaved women and attempted to appropriate female creative power, re-casting themselves as gods and creators. This assault continues today in the forms of ruthless wealth and mineral extraction, genetic engineering, mass surveillance, and war mongering.
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.
War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.
Cameras help to minimize collateral damage, and very often, without a camera a missile cannot fire. Certainly, without a camera a drone can’t function, which means that the very ways in which we wage war are determined in part by how cameras work and whether they work at all.
I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it’s a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.
Morality is contraband in war.
War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
Either war is obsolete, or men are.
American GIs don’t fight this unjust immoral and illegal war of Johnson’s.
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
Women don’t go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.
I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.
A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty.
As we speak, Iran has rolled back its nuclear program, shipped out its uranium stockpile, and the world has avoided another war.
The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts – we have learned only recently how close we were to war – but I knew enough to make me tremble.
In defence of Madiba’s legacy, we will continue to wage a relentless war on corruption and mismanagement of the resources of our country.
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
War is a contagion.
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
War means fighting, and fighting means killing.
War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
