All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

War is always a failure. It means we’ve failed in diplomacy and we’ve failed in talking to one another.

In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.

War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.

It is, of course, merely a truism to say that war, like other social or political evils, is the outcome of the bad management of human society, which is, in its turn, due to certain errors or deficiencies. But our task is to discern the sort of error or deficiency.

All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

War remains the decisive human failure.

Muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death—all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictiveness, just through the ghastly, banal working out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.

War isn't civilized. War is failure. It's the ultimate result of a breakdown in public policy, and soldiers are the machines that handle that breakdown. In warfare, you're taught to do whatever you have to, to stay alive.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.