Quotes on Antiwar

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest...and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

A tyrant... is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?

Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force...Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.