One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
Bertrand Russell
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
It’ll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.
War is not nice.
I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, “Mother, what was war?”
Eve Merriam
If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
Albert Einstein
The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed during war.
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
David Friedman
War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
“There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes.
James Morrow
When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.
I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
All the arms we need are for hugging.
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
Napoleon
A great war leaves the country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.
German Proverb
The most persistent sound which reverberates through men’s history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler
Everyone’s a pacifist between wars. It’s like being a vegetarian between meals.
Colman McCarthy
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
John F. Kennedy
What this planet needs is more mistletoe and less missile-talk.
Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people – and kill them.
Pacifist Badge
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway
War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
George Herbert
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Jeanette Rankin
You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon.
David Lloyd George
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
Jose Narosky
People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich – don’t want to buy anything.
We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage.
James Russell Lowell
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war.
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
War would end if the dead could return.
Stanley Baldwin
War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.
War! that mad game the world so loves to play.
Jonathan Swift
The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.
We need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.
Jello Biafra
If it’s natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how?
Joan Baez
Neither enemy faces, nor the mothers that love them, come to mind when one is thinking of nothing but endeavouring to survive. Philosophising about war is useless under fire.
John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac Asimov
War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It’s peace that’s wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.
The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.
Henry Fosdick
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi
In war, truth is the first casualty.
Aeschylus
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.
Francis Meehan
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Plato
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.
Ambrose Bierce
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.
Napoleon Hill
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell
I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
George McGovern
When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Albert Einstein
You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.
Albert Einstein
We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we’d have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong.
Henry Miller
The refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt is war.
Martin H. Fischer
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway
Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?
Norman Cousins
I think war might be God’s way of teaching us geography.
Paul Rodriguez
The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter.
Reginald Wright Kauffman
Either war is obsolete or men are.
Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people? Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate?
Gregory Clark
It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
Omar Bradley
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann
The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.
We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight
War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.
John F. Kennedy
The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.
War is the only game in which it doesn’t pay to have the home-court advantage.
Dick Motta
Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.
If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say “no” to war. For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses.
Louis Lecoin
The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.
War is fear cloaked in courage.
William Westmoreland
Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
Thomas de Quincey
You can’t say that civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
Henry Kissinger
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
Gandhi
I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we’re subjected monthly. Maybe that’s why men declare war – because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis.
Brett Butler
It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passions, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.
Andre Gide
The military don’t start wars. Politicians start wars.
William Westmoreland
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
Ulysses S. Grant
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
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.
Aldous Huxley
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.
Joseph Heller
To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.
Michael Servetus
A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.
Victor Hugo
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
Otto Von Bismark
The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.
Gerome Gragni & James Rado
War hath no fury like a noncombatant.
Charles Edward Montague
What a country calls its vital… interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.
Simone Weil
War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.
Benjamin Disraeli
The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego – ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.
George Meredith
Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?
Douglas Jerrold
If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.
Pope John Paul II
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
Herbert Hoover
A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil.
William Hooke
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
Havelock Ellis
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.
François Fénelon
War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future.
Pope John Paul II
Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.
Alice Thomas Ellis
Will… the threat of common extermination continue?… Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?
Pope John Paul II
War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue. It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included.
Robert Hall
Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none.
Stuart Chase
Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.
Pieter Geyl
Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?
Holly Near
The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.
Albert Einstein
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Joe Stalin
Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people’s blood.
Lucy Ellman
The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.
Louis Simpson
The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.
George Patton
You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers
Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument.
James Frederick Green
War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.
Charles Evans Hughes
War is a game which were their subjects wise, kings would not play at.
William Cowper
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
They should pick a dry year to fight the war. Better yet, civilize the moronic races and have no wars at all.
Clair J. Clark
I don’t know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.
Georges Clemenceau
As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of exalted characters.
Edward Gibbon
It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.
Fred Woodworth
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
Herbert V. Prochnow
Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases… found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second.
S.L.A. Marshall
You’re an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.
Franklin P. Jones