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War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.
Sep 10, 2025
Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
War seems to me to be a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press
In violence, we forget who we are
There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.
And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.
Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility.
If a country develops an economic system that is based on how to pay for the war, and if the amounts of fixed capital investment that are apparent are tied up in armaments, and if that country is a major exporter of arms, and its industrial fabric is dependent on them, then it would be in that country's interests to ensure that it always had a market. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is clearly in the interests of the world's leading arms exporters to make sure that there is always a war going on somewhere.
A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War, 5 percent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 percent, while in a Third World War 90-95 percent would be civilians.
To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.
There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests.
I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
In the ’60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn’t just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.
Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.
Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity.
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values.
When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?
History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.
We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.
War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.
The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought.
There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented ... The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.
Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.
War is just a racket... I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.
Conquered states that have been accustomed to liberty and the government of their own laws can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them; the second, for the conqueror to go and reside there in person; and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of a few, who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror
The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying, cruelty-all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public acclaim.
Mother’s Day really was in its origin an antiwar day, an antiwar statement. Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War, the loss of life, the carnage, and she created Mother’s Day as a call for women all over the world to come together and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict.
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
Putting aside all the fancy words and academic doubletalk, the basic reason for having a military is to do two jobs -to kill people and to destroy.
Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.