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

All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time, if we believe for one second that nuclear fission and fusion, that type of weapon, would be used in such a war — what is a preventive war? I would say a preventive war, if the words mean anything, is to wage some sort of quick police action in order that you might avoid a terrific cataclysm of destruction later. A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing. ... It seems to me that when, by definition, a term is just ridiculous in itself, there is no use in going any further. There are all sorts of reasons, moral and political and everything else, against this theory, but it is so completely unthinkable in today's conditions that I thought it is no use to go any further.

Lord yes, in a certain sense it was a preventive war, [motivated by] the constant threat of attack, the greater likelihood of its inevitability in the future, and by the military's claim: today war is still possible without defeat, but not in two years! Yes, the generals. It could only have been avoided by a rapprochement with England, that is still my conviction. But after we had decided for a [common] policy with Austria, we could not desert her in such danger.

Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.

Nobody disputes, I believe, that our nuclear weaponry is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities, she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide – the extinction of our race – in the most literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. An officer may, in the hour of his country's defeat and disgrace, commit suicide honourably and rationally with his service revolver; but in any collective context the choice of non-existence, of the obliteration of all future hopes, is insanity.

I am fearing because I am seeing that the only way not to be fighting is to die. I am not wanting to die.

Imitation is suicide.

Suicide is often a failure of community, and claiming it as inevitable is a defense against that failure.

Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.

And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same. You know, there is a fear of dying.