The conception that we can only protect ourselves if we are prepared to protect others surely ought to belong to the nursery stage of social educatio… - Norman Angell

Why is it relatively easy for a few armament makers to persuade 'men to go to war, to give their lives; and quite impossible for the much larger group who would benefit by another form of general destruction to persuade men to destroy their property? It is broadly, of course, because the folly of burning down houses is plain; the folly of the policies which lead to war is not so plain.

The idea that the struggle between nations is part of an evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy. The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; the represent the decaying human element.

While it is fashionable to-day to declare that "war does not pay" nearly everyone believes that policies which lead inevitably to war do pay. Every nation sincerely desires peace; and all nations pursue courses which, if persisted in, must make peace impossible. All nations are quite ready to condemn "in the abstract" armaments, economic nationalism, international suspicion and mistrust, while each one individually clings to his armament, adds to his tariff, invents new modes of economic nationalism, and insists upon an absolute national sovereignty which must make international order impossible and the prolongation of anarchy and chaos inevitable.