WAR QUOTES III
quotations about war
In war any lessons learnt must often be paid for with blood.
MARTIN VAN CREVELD
"Why the best teacher of war is war", OUP blog, April 9, 2017
Duelling was abolished because man's conscience told him that to be opposed to a man with less knowledge of how to use his weapon, was so certain of killing him, the odds being so unequal, that in reality it was "murder." What difference is there when a strong nation goes to war with a weak one? And is not this generally the case with wars? The chances are not even; it is only a matter of time; if so, is not war generally wholesale murder? We must in time consider wars as acts of barbarism, the acts of savages. Men will see that war for honour is as foolish between nations as if done between individuals.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping exhausted men come out of line-the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Address at Chautauqua, August 14, 1936
Organizations like the UN, IMF, NATO and others, were designed to raise the cost of waging war, thereby reducing the economic benefits of doing so and encouraging other means of resolving disputes and seeking economic growth. The result has not been that warring is no longer done, obviously. It has, however, profoundly changed the decision-making process in two ways. First, wars are now not just economic in nature, but essentially exclusively about economics. Second, warring is now not the result of the failure of other diplomatic means, but the extension of them. The waging of war now requires, at least, two parties to agree to do so, with both expecting an economic benefit in doing so. Wars are negotiated, pragmatic economic events. They are not aggressor and defender.
ROGER ARNOLD
"When War Is a Win-Win Scenario", The Street, April 12, 2017
A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
War's one of those things, don't you think, where everyone always thinks they're in the right have you noticed that? Nobody ever says we're the bad guys, we're going to beat shit out of the good guys.
CARYL CHURCHILL
A Number
It is the good war that hallows every cause.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
There has been no war without atrocity. War is atrocity, pure and simple: only greed, nationalism and faith help us pretend otherwise.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
Blood of Angels
Accursed be he that first invented war.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Tamburlaine the Great
There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
WALT WHITMAN
Reconciliation
There is an even darker scenario, one that makes questions about medical care superfluous. If as few as 100 bombs were to explode over densely-populated cities, soot from the resulting fires would enter the upper atmosphere and lead to global cooling for a decade or more--resulting in a nuclear winter. If the United States and Russia use their several thousand weapons, the planet will cool dramatically, likely leading to a mass extinction and the end of civilization and life as we know it.
PETER GORMAN
"Nuclear War Is Not Good For Your Health", Huffington Post, April 20, 2017
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
OSCAR WILDE
The Critic as Artist
If you think of humanity as one large body, then war is like suicide, or at best, self mutilation.
JEROME P. CRABB
War Quotes and Quibbles
If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is "holy war".
STEVE ALLEN
Reflections
Is it not tragic, for example, that while in the last World War almost everyone believed it was the war to end all wars and wanted to make it so, now in this Second World War almost no writer that I have read dares even suggest that this is the war to end all wars, or act on that belief? We have lost the courage to hope.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.
THICH NHAT HANH
Being Peace
With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a "smart bomb," it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered "just," because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary.
HOWARD ZINN
Howard Zinn on War
The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war," your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on TV tonight.
ECKHART TOLLE
A New Earth