15 Quotes Tagged: War

there are men, not a few, in this country who can read history and write newspaper articles, and whom therefore we must set down I suppose as belonging to the intelligent classes, who desire war for the sake of war: gentlemen, I have heard a great deal of indignation wasted upon those who were for peace at any price; what indignation can be too great to bestow on those who are for war at any price?

[On war] A wanton waste of projectiles.

We are haltingly, tentatively breaking the shackles of the earth ... but our energies are directed far more toward war.

Hypnotized by mutual mistrust, almost never concerned for the species or the planet, the nations prepare for death.

And because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much.

But what we do not consider we are unlikely to put right.

But our energies are directed far more toward war. Hypnotized by mutual mistrust, almost never concerned for the species or the planet, the nations prepare for death. And because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much. But what we do not consider we are unlikely to put right.
Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse.

If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies? From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: to preserve the lives and well-being of the citizens of the planet. Should we not then be willing to explore vigorously, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental redesign of economic, political, social and religious institutions?
Faced with so disquieting an alternative, we are always tempted to minimize the seriousness of the problem, to argue that those who worry about doomsday’s are alarmists; to hold that fundamental changes in our institutions are impractical or contrary to ‘human nature’, as if nuclear war were practical, or as if there were only one human nature. Full-scale nuclear war has never happened. Somehow this is taken to imply that it never will. But we can experience it only once. But then it will be too late to reformulate the statistics.

Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?

It is pointless to worry about the possible malevolent intentions of an advanced civilization with whom we might make contact. It is more likely that the mere fact they have survived so long means they have learned to live with themselves and others. Perhaps our fears about extraterrestrial contact are merely a projection of our own backwardness, an expression of our guilty conscience about our past history: the ravages that have been visited on civilizations only slightly more backward than we.

...individuals so employed need almost never accept responsibility for their actions. They are protected and anonymous. Military secrecy makes the military the most difficult sector of any society for the citizens to monitor. If we do not know what they do, it is very hard for us to stop them.

We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature.

"One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.

The people who make wars, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word- these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one another's throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.

Every major power has some widely publicized justification for its procurement and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, often including a reptilian reminder of the presumed character and cultural defects of potential enemies (as opposed to us stout fellows), or of the intentions of others, but never ourselves, to conquer the world.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by
education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and
the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the
latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What
could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war
itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it
a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly
cargo?