Quotes on War

"I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded... I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed... I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think."
— Pat Schroeder

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
— Herbert Hoover

"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war."
— Abbie Hoffman

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction."
— Albert Einstein

"Let us pray that our country will stop this war."
— U.S. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio)

"After each war there is a little less democracy to save."
— Brooks Atkinson

"The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure."
— Lyndon B Johnson

"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

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important."
— TS Eliot

"We thought because we had power we had wisdom."
— Stephen Benet

"The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service."
— Albert Einstein

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."
— John F. Kennedy

"Today the real test of power is not the capacity to make war but the capacity to prevent it."
— Anne O'Hare McCormick

"When the rich make war it's the poor that die."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army."
— Edward Everett

"All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Never has there been a good war or a bad peace."
— Benjamin Franklin

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
— George McGovern

"Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent."
— Issac Asimov

"If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."
— Moshe Dayan

"War, that mad game the world loves to play."
— Jonathan Swift

Gunter Grass’s famous line, “The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
— Albert Einstein

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The 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."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. You may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish truth. You may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate, nor establish love. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

On dissent:

“We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong — this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.”
—W. E. B. Dubois

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground. They want the rain without the awful roar of the thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Without struggle, there is no progress. This struggle might be a moral one. It might be a physical one. It might be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. People may not get all that they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all that they get.”
—Frederick Douglass, 1857

“It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”
— U. S. Supreme Court

On tyranny, patriotism and wartime politics:

“Why of course the people don't want war... Naturally... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
—Hermann Goering

“A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures on armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.”
—Anatole France

“When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Beware of the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.”
“And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind is closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and do it gladly so.”
“How do I know? I know for this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”
— credited to Julius Caesar

In 1910, Mark Twain made this remarkably prescient observation of how a noisy, hawkish minority can drown out a sensible majority in a rush to war:

"The loud little handful — as usual — will shout for the war.

The pulpit will — warily and cautiously — object — at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, 'It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.'
Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out shout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers — as earlier — but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation — pulpit and all — will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." — Excerpted from Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger."