Quotes on Antiwar

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

Look at you in war...There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war.

Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations.

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.

This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina.

In war, truth is the first casualty.

Tis not, 'my country right or wrong'; tis, 'my country, that which is right to be kept right, that which is wrong to be set right'

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.