quotations about war
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
LEWIS MUMFORD
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Technics and Civilization
Let me be clear: the use of starvation as a weapon of war is a war crime.
BAN KI-MOON
"Starvation 'as a weapon' is a war crime, UN chief warns parties to conflict in Syria", UN News Centre, January 14, 2016
when a great war has cut off the young men of a nation it never can be told thereafter what losses of scholars, poets, thinkers and great designers the country and the world have suffered.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
There's this tradition that The Iliad is about war. It's very easy to support that tradition by picking out four or five main scenes. But when one reads the entirety of the epic, it is unambiguously clear at every turn that the poem is evoking the blighting effect of this war on every single participant in it. Old men, civilians, children, captive women or wives, as well as the warriors, like Achilles--they all decry it. Every adjective evokes the destruction and tragedy of war. It's literally a war of tears.
CAROLINE ALEXANDER
"War is Unavoidable--and Other Hard Lessons from Homer's Iliad", National Geographic, January 10, 2016
Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war. The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term "mankind" feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto
If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
fifth annual address to Congress, December 13, 1793
War is such an indefeasible and unescapable Real that the good realist must accept it rather comprehensively. To keep out of it is pure quietism, an acute moral failure to adjust. At the same time, there is an inexorability about war. It is a little unbridled for the realist's rather nice sense of purposive social control. And nothing is so disagreeable to the pragmatic mind as any kind of an absolute. The realist pragmatist could not recognize war as inexorable--though to the common mind it would seem as near an absolute, coercive social situation as it is possible to fall into. For the inexorable abolishes choices, and it is the essence of the realist's creed to have, in every situation, alternatives before him.
RANDOLPH SILLIMAN BOURNE
War and the Intellectuals
War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.
DON DELILLO
End Zone
Wars start like this. Cultures gamble decadence and death will win them rebirth, watch themselves sliding into it, knowing it's an all-or-nothing bet.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Such is the nature of war that, at the top, there is hardly any aspect of human behavior, individual and collective, which does not impinge on its conduct. And which, as a result, those in charge do not have to take into account and act upon.
MARTIN VAN CREVELD
"Why the best teacher of war is war", OUP blog, April 9, 2017
The decision to use military hard power is a serious one and never taken lightly. The military establishment does everything in its power to mitigate risk in a battlespace that can only be described as "murky" because, no matter the amount of intelligence or planning, the only certainty is uncertainty.
ROBERT MAKROS
"'Clean war' is the unicorn of armed conflict", The Hill, March 31, 2017
War ... it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch-22
Wars grew and mutated, finding ways to stay alive; they hung on with the grim tenacity of a weed growing in a crack in a wall, feeding on whatever nutrients their roots and tendrils could find.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
War is a monster with snaky locks, and fiery bloodshot eyes, and harpy claws, passing over fair fields and leaving its footprints in burning villages, dying men, weeping wives and children, and needs to be seen by those who so eagerly clamour for it at every opportunity. The sight of that fearful phantom, girt round with skulls, chains reeking with blood and desolation and ruin in its track, would stop their eagerness for it, unless under real compulsion.
M. D. CONWAY
attributed, Platt's Essays
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World Revisited
If each man were to lay down his weapon, and say,
With a click of his heels, "I wish you Good-day,"
Now what, may I ask, could the Emperor do?
A king and his minions are really so few.
AMY LOWELL
Men, Women and Ghosts
War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
On War
War ... should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.
JAMES MADISON
"Universal Peace"
What they could use around here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization. And when do you get organization? In a war. Peace is one big waste of equipment. Anything goes, no one gives a damn. See the way they eat? Cheese on pumpernickel, bacon on the cheese? Disgusting! How many horses have they got in this town? How many young men? Nobody knows! They haven't bothered to count 'em! That's peace for you! I've been in places where they haven't had a war for seventy years and you know what? The people haven't even been given names! They don't know who they are! It takes a war to fix that. In a war, everyone registers, everyone's name's on a list. Their shoes are stacked, their corn's in the bag, you count it all up -- cattle, men, et cetera -- and you take it away! That's the story: no organization, no war!
BERTOLT BRECHT
Mother Courage
The changes and vicissitude in wars are many; but chiefly in three things; in the seats or stages of the war; in the weapons; and in the manner of the conduct. Wars, in ancient time, seemed more to move from east to west; for the Persians, Assyrians, Arabians, Tartars (which were the invaders) were all eastern people. It is true, the Gauls were western; but we read but of two incursions of theirs: the one to Gallo-Grecia, the other to Rome. But east and west have no certain points of heaven; and no more have the wars, either from the east or west, any certainty of observation. But north and south are fixed; and it hath seldom or never been seen that the far southern people have invaded the northern, but contrariwise. Whereby it is manifest that the northern tract of the world, is in nature the more martial region: be it in respect of the stars of that hemisphere; or of the great continents that are upon the north, whereas the south part, for aught that is known, is almost all sea; or (which is most apparent) of the cold of the northern parts, which is that which, without aid of discipline, doth make the bodies hardest, and the courages warmest.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Vicissitude Of Things", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral