The Construct: 2004

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

– George Washington

Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

~Benjamin Franklin

The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

~General Smedley Butler

Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land or at least to control the government or resources of another people.

~John T. Flynn

The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics...

~Simone Weil

We may extend our dominion over the whole continent...but be assured it will be at the price of our free institutions.

~Rep. William Waters Boyce

I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses...

~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.

~Senator Robert M. La Follette

After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.

~Jeanette Winterson

Wars are inevitable...as long as we believe that wars are inevitable. The moment we don't believe it anymore it is not inevitable.

~Lydia Sicher

The winds that blow our billions away return burdened with themes of scorn and dispraise.

~Garet Garrett

I hope....that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats...

~Benjamin Franklin

[T]he essence of so-called war prosperity; it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.

~Ludwig von Mises

Our children are not born to hate, they are raised to hate.

~Thomas della Peruta

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

~Donald Rumsfeld

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

~Marie Beyle

I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

~Phillip Caputo

Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

~Hannah Areddt

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

~Mary Roberts Rinehart

Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.

~George Washington

The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.

~Major Ralph Peters, US Military

For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.

~Ernie Pyle

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official...

~Theodore Roosevelt

The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.

~Tacitus

War creates peace like hate creates love.

~David L. Wilson

War's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.

~William Cowper

Military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy...

~Abraham Lincoln

Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.

~Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice

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

~George McGovern

War is fear cloaked in courage.

~General William Westmoreland

Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.

~A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"

Never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.

~Sir Winston Churchill

What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage.

~Marcus Tullius Cicero

We are the ones responsible to determine whether the war that our marines, soldiers and airmen are fighting in is worth the cause...

~Scott Ritter

I am not blaming those who are resolved to rule, only those who show an even greater readiness to submit.

~Thucydides

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

~Frederick Douglass

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

~Noam Chomsky

It is far easier to make war than peace.

~Georges Clemenceau

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

~Robert Lynd

Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.

~Ulysses S. Grant

It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village.

~Voltaire

Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

~Benjamin Franklin

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

~James Madison

War doesn't make boys men, it makes men dead.

~Ken Gillespie

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.

~Thomas Paine

Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms...

~Simone Weil

Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely.

~Senator Robert M. La Follette

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

~Albert Camus

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.

~Edward R. Murrow

Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.

~W. L. George

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.

~Marcus Aurelius

The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.

~Marcus Tullius Cicero

Man was/is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they.

~Jean Jaques Rousseau

The dangerous patriot...drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions.

~Colonel James A. Donovan, Marine Corps

I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great.

~Ernie Pyle

It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.

~Theodore Roosevelt

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.

~General Douglas MacArthur

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

~John Milton

The statesman who yields to war fever...is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

~Sir Winston Churchill

Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people...

~Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice

Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent.

~Issac Asimov

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.

~Mahatma Gandhi

Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.

~Marquis de Sade

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.

~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

It is always more valuable to report the truth.

~Jean-Paul Sartre

Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

~George Orwell

What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.

~Leo Tolstoy

Peace is constructed, not fought for.

~Brent Davis

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils.

~Thucydides

We say that we care about the war, but we don’t even really know what we’re fighting for.

~Scott Ritter

In this war – as in others – I am less interested in honoring the dead than in preventing the dead.

~Butler Shaffer

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood...War is hell.

~General William Tecumseh Sherman

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

~Voltaire

When one doesn’t have the courage needed to be a pacifist, one’s a warrior. The pacifist is always alone.

~Jean Giono

some men...in order to prevent the supposed intentions of their adversaries, have committed the most enormous cruelties...

~Clearchus, in Xenophon

[War] might be avoidable were more emphasis placed on the training to social interest, less on the attainment of egotistical grandeur.

~Lydia Sicher

War is a way of shattering to pieces...materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses... too intelligent.

~George Orwell, "1984"

In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available...in America right now.

~Merle Haggard

If, finally, violence meets with violence, we have confirmation of the age old adage that war though it kills many men, makes many more men evil.

~Fritz Medicus

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so...

~Robert A. Heinlein

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice.

~Lord Acton

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

~Groucho Marx

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them.

~Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

~Margaret Mead

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

~James Madison

Look at you in war...There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war.

~Mark Twain

The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.

~James Madison

...Violence as a way of gaining power...is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security...

~Alfred Adler

Every nation has its war party...It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition.

~Senator Robert M. La Follette

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

~Alfred Adler

As long as we can talk with people, as long as one can keep the guns quiet, one has a chance.

~Lydia Sicher

It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

~Alfred Adler

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

~Jimmy Carter

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

~Thomas Jefferson

The dangerous patriot...is a defender of militarism and its ideals of war and glory.

~Colonel James A. Donovan, Marine Corps

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

~Winston Churchill

When [men] go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace.

~St. Augustine, "The City of God"

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

~Karl Von Clausewitz

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

Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers?

~Marquis de Sade

The next war ... may well bury Western civilization forever.

~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.

~William Ellery Channing

...Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population...

~Jean-Paul Sartre

War is at best barbarism. Its glory is all moonshine...War is hell.

~General William Tecumseh Sherman

The voice of protest...is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum...is bidding all men...obey in silence the tyrannous word of command.

~Charles Eliot Norton

Our neoconservatives are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.

~Edward Abbey

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

~Frederick Douglass

The war...was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.

~Robert E. Lee

Where is the justice of political power if it...marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

~Kahlil Gibran

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Respect for the rights of others means peace.

~Benito Juárez

War is not a word, it's an acronym for "Wasting Another's Resources."

~Ramman Kenoun

Let us become inspired by inherent beauty, and not impassioned by manufactured hate.

~Nima Shirali, Middle Eastern Reconciliation Forum

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

~James Anthony Froude

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

~Emmanuel Goldstein

War remains the decisive human failure.

~John Kenneth Galbraith

That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

~Theodore Roosevelt

All nations want peace, but they want a peace that suits them.

~Admiral Sir John Fisher

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.

~Thomas Jefferson

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

~Albert Camus

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

~Albert Einstein

All mankind...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.

~John Locke

Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it.

~Anne O'Hare McCormick

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.

~H.L. Mencken

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

~Agatha Christie

I hate war...for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

~Voltaire

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

~Thomas Jefferson

To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.

~Alfred Adler

If there is no sufficient reason for war, the [war] party will make war on one pretext, then invent another...pretext after war is on.

~Sen. Robert M. La Follette

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

~General Smedley Butler

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

~Lois McMaster Bujold

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

~Edward Abbey

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

~Stephen Vincent Benét

Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism...which identifies numerous enemies who can only be dealt with through military power...

~Colonel James A. Donovan, Marine Corps

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

~Lyndon B. Johnson

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

~James Madison

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

~Ronald Reagan

What is more immoral than war?

~Marquis de Sade

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest...and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war

~Plato

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.

~General Smedley Butler

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.

~Senator John McCain

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total...because it may well involve the whole world.

~Jean-Paul Sartre

Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is delightful to the inexperienced).

~Erasmus, the 16th-century scholar

Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

~William Penn

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

~Emmanuel Goldstein

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer?

~Kahlil Gibran

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

We first fought...in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

~Serj Tankian

People do not make wars; governments do.

~Ronald Reagan

Any forces that would impose their will on other nations will certainly face defeat.

~General Vo Nguyen Giap (Vietnam)

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution.

~Thomas Alva Edison

Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.

~Ronald Reagan

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president...is morally treasonable to the American public.

~Theodore Roosevelt

To declare that the end justifies the means, to declare that the government may commit crimes, would bring terrible retribution.

~Justice Louis D. Brandeis

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

~Thomas Jefferson

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

~James Madison

Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

~George Orwell

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

~Plato

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

~Abraham Lincoln

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.

~Theodore Roosevelt

This world of ours...must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

War is the business of barbarians.

~Napoleon Bonaparte

The Department of Defense is the behemoth...With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire.

~The 9/11 Commission Report (Norton First Edition)

War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.

~Alexander Berkman

One day the end of the world will come as a result of a 'justified' war.

~Mikhail Gofman, Antiwar.com reader

Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

~George W. Bush

There should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.

~Jimmy Carter

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

~Brooks Atkinson

Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

~Alfred Adler

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over...is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

~G. K. Chesterton

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

~Alfred Adler

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter...

~Winston Churchill

Chauvinism is a proud and bellicose form of patriotism...which equates the national honor with military victory.

~Colonel James A. Donovan, Marine Corps

Man's enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.

~Lao Tzu

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

~Marquis de Sade

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

~Ludwig von Mises

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.

~George Orwell

Criticism in a time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government.

~Sen. Robert Taft, (R) Ohio

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.

~Senator Robert M. La Follette

War is a way of shattering to pieces...materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and...too intelligent.

~Emmanuel Goldstein

There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.

~John James Ingalls

Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose...

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.

~George Bernard Shaw

...no mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.

~Ronald Reagan

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

~Voltaire

It is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well...than to kill ten thousand.

~Olive Schreiner

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

~George Orwell

The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.

~Frank Kent

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

~Albert Camus

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

~Jose Narosky

What a cruel thing is war...to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.

~Robert E. Lee

...to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

~Theodore Roosevelt

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.

~Thomas Jefferson

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.

~Alexander Berkman

There is but one evil, war. All the other proclaimed evils such as hate, greed, descrimination, and jealousy are only sub-categories of it.

~Jose Barreiro

Emphasis on military prowess is an indication of philosophical poverty.

~Henk Middelraad

War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing...

~Louis Mumford (from "Technics and Civilization")

What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.

~Mikhail Gorbachev (from speech given 11/28/86)

War brings out the most negative emotional human responses on both sides.

~Henk Middelraad

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

~James Baldwin

Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with...

~Gerard K. O'Neill

Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity.

~James Bryce

Don't talk to me about atrocities; all war is an atrocity.

~Lord Kitchener (Horatio Herbert)

There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive.

~Jack Straw, UK Foreign Secretary

We cloak ourselves in cold indifference to the unnecessary suffering of others--even when we cause it.

~James Carroll (Boston Globe, 9/21/04)

Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

~Ludwig von Mises

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

~George W. Bush (UN address, 9/04)

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.

~A. J. Muste

The State thrives on war – unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed – expands on it, glories in it.

~Murray Rothbard

Old men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

~Herbert C. Hoover

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

~Leo Tolstoy

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

~Lao Tzu

Most wars are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions...

~Thomas Sowell

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking.

~Ludwig von Mises

It is for us to refuse loyalty when injustice holds sway.

~Henry T. Laurency, in "The Philosopher's Stone"

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

~Russell Baker

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

~Ronald Reagan

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

~Aesop

One reason the United States finds itself at the edge of a foreign policy disaster is its underinformed citizenry, a key weakness in a democracy.

~Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, "America Alone"

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.

~Mark Twain

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

~Sir Francis Bacon

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

~James Madison

Let us form a new religion, that which would be called 'humanity', with 'peace' as its prophet.

~Nima Shirali, Middle Eastern Reconciliation Forum

All men having power ought to be mistrusted.

~James Madison

All war is based on deception.

~Sun Tzu

In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer...

~Louis Mumford (from "Technics and Civilization")

What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise.

~Barbara Jordan

Dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify.

~Gerard K. O'Neill

Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.

~James Bryce

Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.

~Dorothy Thompson

We carefully nurture a spirit of detachment toward the wars we pay for.

~James Carroll (Boston Globe, 9/21/04)

These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave...I think the world would be better off if we did leave...

~George W. Bush (speaking on Iraqi Insurgency, 9/04)

There are no politics in war. Politics is the luxury of the safe-at-home. War is a lottery of survival.

~John Cory

War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.

~Congressman Ron Paul

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

~Patrick J. Buchanan

The reality right now is that the most dangerous opinion in the world is the opinion of a U.S. serviceman.

~Lance Cpl. Devin Kelly (USMC)

National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing the people.

~Senator John Taylor (1753-1824)

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies.

~Basil O'Connor

All government wars are unjust.

~Murray Rothbard

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

~Herman Goering

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening...

~Leo Tolstoy

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

~Lao Tzu

Wars have ever been but another aristocratic mode of plundering and oppressing commerce.

~Richard Cobden

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.

~Thomas Jefferson

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.

~Josh Billings

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.

~Edmund Burke

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

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

~Noam Chomsky

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

~Plato

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

~Friedrich Hebbel, German poet and dramatist

The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection.

~Butler Shaffer

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

~Louis Mumford (from "Technics and Civilization")

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

~Benjamin Harrison (addressing Congress, 1888)

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

~Louis D. Brandeis

Peace...is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle.

~Dorothy Thompson

There is no morality in war. Morality is the privilege of those judging from the distance. War is only death and destruction...

~John Cory

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true...

~Thomas Paine

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

~Ramsey Clark

Wars based on principle are far more destructive...the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

~Alan Watts (from "The Way of Zen")

In war, there are no winners.

~Ramman Kenoun

...The very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology.

~Murray Rothbard

Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever knew.

~John Greenleaf Whittier

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

~Sigmund Freud

It's more humane to cure your enemies than to kill them.

~Hugh Mann

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable.

~Albert Pike

There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance.

~Goethe

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.

~Edward Everett

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.

~Senator James W. Fulbright

Coercive practices that threaten our neighbor(s) also threaten us.

~Butler Shaffer

We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us.

~Francis John McConnell

A man who kills on his own is a murderer. A man who kills at his government's request is a national hero.

~Ramman Kenoun

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the death of others on the altar of their greed.

~John Cory

The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.

~Frank Chodorov

No great dependence is to be placed on the eagerness of young soldiers for action...fighting is agreeable to those who are strangers to it.

~Vegetius

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

~Voltaire

I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

~Jim Garrison

The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force.

~Norman Cousins

In order to rally people, governments need enemies...if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

~Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk

We must get away from the idea that America is to be the leader of the world in everything.

~Francis John McConnell

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny...

~David Hume

The coward threatens when he is safe.

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If this phrase of the 'balance of power' is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure.

~John Bright

Mankind deserves sacrifice - but not of mankind.

~Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

We believed ourselves indestructable... watching only the madmen outside our frontiers, and we remained defenseless against our own madmen.

~Jacobo Timerman (Israeli jounralist, 1982)

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

~Barbara Ehrenreich

War is the cemetery of futures promised.

~John Cory

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.

~Michael Servetus

Phony pretexts repeated often enough become real reasons. Things that...are not true become true in the public mind simply through endless repetition.

~Lenny Bloom

The fact that certain planets are uninhabited may very well derive from the fact that their nuclear scientist are more advanced than ours.

~Salon Gahlin (swedish author)

War is eternity jammed into frantic minutes that will fill a lifetime with dreams and nightmares.

~John Cory

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people...

~Leo Tolstoy

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

~Friedrich August von Hayek

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

~Ronald Reagan

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

~Ludwig von Mises

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.

~Albert J. Nock

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

~John Adams

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

~Alexis de Tocqueville

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

~John Stuart Mill

The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.

~Ron Paul

Force always attracts men of low morality.

~Albert Einstein

War is just a racket...I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.

~General Smedley Butler

War technology is science in the service of obscene anatomical vandalism.

~Stan Goff

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

~General Smedley Butler

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.

~Eleanor Roosevelt

The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad.

~James Madison

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

~Abraham Lincoln

Our nation is somewhat sad, but we’re angry. There’s a certain level of blood lust, but we won’t let it drive our reaction. We’re steady, clear-eyed and patient, but pretty soon we’ll have to start displaying scalps.

~George W. Bush

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

~General Douglas MacArthur

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

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 and democracy?

~Mahatma Ghandi

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

~John 8:32

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

~Colin Powell

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

~Colin Powell

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

~Colin Powell

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

~General William Westmoreland

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

~General William Westmoreland

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.

~Ambrose Bierce

War, n: A time-tested political tactic guaranteed to raise a president’s popularity rating by at least 30 points. It is especially useful during election years and economic downturns.

~Chaz Bufe

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

~Calgacus

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

~Calgacus

I learned nothing from war. War is not an activity for human beings; war is for criminals—rape, robbery and murder.

~Roman Podabedov (Russian anti-tank gunner)

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

~Howard Zinn

War is a racket.

~Smedley Butler

We have to show the American People that war is not patriotic.

~Justin Raimondo

If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.

~Frederick the Great

They talk about conscription as a democratic institution. Yes; so is a cemetary.

~Rep. Meyer London

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

~R. Buckminster Fuller

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

~Jeanette Rankin, first woman member of Congress

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

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

~George McGovern

If I'm fighting for freedom here, and I go home and I'm opressed, what does that mean?

~Pv2 Frederick Phoenix, MP, US Army

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.

~Georges Clemenceau

Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.

~Duke of Wellington

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

~James Baldwin

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.

~John F. Kennedy

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

~Guy de Maupassant

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

~Thomas Carlyle

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

~Abraham Lincoln

Why should you ask blood be spilled for a cause that is not in the interest of the American people?

~Rep. Wally Herger

All wars are fought for money.

~Socrates

Tis nobler to lose honor to save the lives of men than it is to gain honor by taking them.

~David Borenstein

Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.

~Mark Twain

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.

~Abraham Lincoln

The first casualty when war comes is the truth.

~Sen. Hiram Johnson

This war is not necessary. We are truly sleepwalking through history.

~Sen. Robert Byrd

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

~Lyndon B. Johnson

They talk about conscription as a democratic institution. Yes; so is a cemetery.

~Rep. Meyer London

Washington...has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire.

~Richard Maybury

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

~George Washington

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

~John Adams

A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.

~Sigmund Freud

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

~Thomas Mann

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

~Robert Lynd

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

~Herodotus

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.

~General Douglas MacArthur

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

~Brooks Atkinson

I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world.

~General Colin Powell

If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.

~George W. Bush

We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

~Jimmy Carter

Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men.

~Pope John Paul II

If peace...only had the music and pagaentry of war, there'd be no wars.

~Sophie Kerr

God hates violence. He has ordained that all men fairly possess their property, not seize it.

~Euripides

Every man thinks god is on his side.

~Jean Anouilh

All the gods are dead except the god of war.

~Eldridge Cleaver

The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wars should be over in three days or less...and the American people must be all for it from the outset.

~Evan Thomas

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives...inside ourselves.

~Albert Camus

The supreme excellence is to subde the armies of your enemies without even having to fight them.

~Sun Tzu

From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.

~Denis Diderot

The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.

~Walter Lippmann

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

~George Washington

We must recognize the chief characteristic of the modern era--a permanent state of what I call violent peace.

~Admiral James D. Watkins

The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.

~Thomas Jefferson

No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war.

~Calvin Coolidge

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man has a right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?

~Blaise Pascal

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

~Montesquieu

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

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

~E. M. Forster

It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow...that are the aftermath of war.

~Herbert C. Hoover

There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.

~Golda Meir

The military doesn't start wars. The politicians start wars.

~General William Westmoreland

It is the merit of a general to impart good news, and to conceal the truth.

~Sophocles

In war, truth is the first casualty.

~Aeschylus

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

~Oscar Wilde

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid...There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party...

~George Bernard Shaw

"My country right or wrong" is like saying, "My mother drunk or sober."

~G. K. Chesterton

As a rule, high culture and military power go hand in hand, as evidenced in the cases of Greece and Rome.

~Baron Colmar Von Der Goltz

History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

~Enoch Powell

At least we're getting the kind of experience we need for the next war.

~Allen Dulles

War is the greatest plague that can affect humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.

~Martin Luther

How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.

~Albert Einstein

Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?

~Oriana Fallaci

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

~Barbara Tuchman

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

~Winston Churchill

Hate is able to provoke disorders, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions; but it produces nothing.

~Georges Sorel

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.

~John Galsworthy

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

~Antoine De Saint-Exupery

War is the health of the State.

~Randolph Bourne

War is the Health of the State.

~Randolph Bourne

War would end if the dead could return.

~Stanley Baldwin

There are no warlike people--just warlike leaders.

~Ralph Bunche

Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.

~Charles V of France

As for being a General, well, at the age of four with paper hates and wooden swords, we're all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.

~Peter Ustinov

To wage war, you need first of all money; second, you need money, and third, you also need money.

~Prince Montecuccoli

Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.

~Benjamin Franklin

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.

~William Ralph Inge

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

~Ernest Hemingway

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

~Ernest Hemingway

You can't have this kind of war. There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Atomic Age is here to stay--but are we?

~Bennett Cerf

You've got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you're going to hit civilians.

~Barry Goldwater

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

~Eleanor Roosevelt

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.

~Albert Einstein

Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or world destruction.

~Bernard M. Baruch

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own.

~H. G. Wells

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.

~Gary Wills

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

~Clarence Darrow

You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotsim that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it or who says it.

~Malcolm X

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be...surer of the noose than a private homicide.

~H. G. Wells

It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it only takes twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

~King Baudouin I of Belgium

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.

~E. B. White

In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.

~Herodotus

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

~Winston Churchill

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

~Simon de Beauvoir

One more such victory and we are undone.

~Pyrrhus of Epirus

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

~Edmund Burke

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

~H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

~H. L. Mencken

Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.

~Alexander Hamilton

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

~Plato

The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.

~Ron Paul

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force...Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

~George Washington

It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

~George Washington

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

~H. L. Mencken

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

~John Quincy Adams

...patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.

~Julius Caesar

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another...

~Sigmund Freud

The coward threatens when he is safe.

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken — what needs to be outlawed is war.

~Leslie Richard Groves

Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn't have as many monuments to unveil.

~Kin Hubbard

A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

~Thomas Jefferson

War is just one more big government program.

~Joseph Sobran

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

~Joseph Sobran

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

~Samuel Adams

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

~Ayn Rand

Most wars are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.

~Thomas Sowell

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

~Benjamin Harrison (addressing Congress, 1888)

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.

~Ludwig von Mises

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

~Ludwig von Mises

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.

~Ludwig von Mises

War is the Health of the State.

~Randolph Bourne

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

~Ludwig von Mises

The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.

~Ludwig von Mises

History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents…. A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

~Ludwig von Mises

Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.

~Thomas Jefferson

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

~Thomas Jefferson

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

~Benjamin Franklin

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

~James Madison

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

~Joseph Sobran

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

~Thomas Jefferson

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

~H.L. Mencken

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

~John Quincy Adams

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

~Plato

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

~Plato

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

~Brooks Atkinson

An eye for an eye makes us all blind.

~Mahatma Gandhi

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

~Leo Tolstoy

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

~James Madison

The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.

~George Washington

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

~Justice Louis D. Brandeis

No one has deputized America to play Wyatt Earp to the world.

~Pat Buchanan

the expenditures for such warfare...have crippled the nation's livelihood and exhausted the resources of the people.

~Mo Tzu

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

~Voltaire

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

~Noam Chomsky

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

~Mikhail Gorbachev

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

~Edward Abbey

Our ‘neoconservatives’ are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.

~Edward Abbey

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

~Edward Abbey

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.

~Edmund Burke

I think war is a dangerous place.

~George W. Bush

War’s a brain spattering windpipe splitting art.

~Lord Byron

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

~Murray Rothbard

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

~Robert Lynd

It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty.

~John C. Calhoun

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

~G. K. Chesterton

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

~Frank Chodorov

The pertinent question: if Americans did not want these wars should they have been compelled to fight them?

~Frank Chodorov

The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.

~Frank Chodorov

The more laws, the less justice.

~Marcus Tullius Cicero

The sinews of war are infinite money.

~Marcus Tullius Cicero

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

~Carl P. G. von Clausewitz

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.

~Carl P. G. von Clausewitz

Wars have ever been but another aristocratic mode of plundering and oppressing commerce.

~Richard Cobden

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.

~Davy Crockett

A standing army is a standing menace to liberty.

~Voltairine de Clayre

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

War settles nothing.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you kill one person you are a murderer. If you kill ten people you are a monster. If you kill ten thousand you are a national hero.

~Vassilis Epaminondou

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

~Sigmund Freud

When American presidents prepare for foreign wars, they lie.

~Robert Higgs

Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war.

~Robert Higgs

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

~Thomas Hobbes

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

Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.

~Thomas Jefferson

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

~Thomas Jefferson

Nations of eternal war [expend] all their energies. . . in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people.

~Thomas Jefferson

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

~Thomas Jefferson

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

~Thomas Jefferson

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

~Helen Keller

Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!

~Helen Keller

Nothing good ever comes of violence.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

~George Orwell

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.

~George Orwell

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

~Howard Zinn

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

~Ludwig von Mises

Will . . . the threat of common extermination continue?. . . Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance?

~Pope John Paul II

War--after all, what is it that the people get? Why--widows, taxes, wooden legs and debt.

~Samuel B. Pettengill

No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.

~A. J. P. Taylor

No war is inevitable until it breaks out.

~A. J. P. Taylor

Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat- including men--from reluctant citizens...

~Charles Tilly

All warfare is based on deception.

~Sun Tzu

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

~Sun Tzu

I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.

~Rear Admiral Gene R. LaRocque

War has become a spectator sport for Americans.

~Rear Admiral Gene R. LaRocque

We all have to be concerned about terrorism, but you will never end terrorism by terrorizing others.

~Martin Luther King III

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

~General Douglas MacArthur

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

~James Madison

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

~James Madison

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

~James Madison

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

~James Madison

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

~James Madison

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

~Thomas Mann

Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war.

~Joseph A. Schumpeter

War is the statesmans game, the priests delight, the lawyers jest, the hired assassins trade.

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

War is just one more big government program.

~Joseph Sobran

This president failed so miserably in diplomacy that we are now forced to war.

~Tom Daschle

The opposite of war is not peace, it's creation.

~Jonathan Larson

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is it security you want? There is no security at the top of the world.

~Garet Garrett

With no notice to the American people...this country entered the war...Stranger than the fact was the passive acceptance of it.

~Garet Garrett

What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness god has given us in this world...

~Robert E. Lee

What a cruel thing war is...to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.

~Robert E. Lee

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

~R. Buckminster Fuller

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

~Ronald Reagan

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

~Isaac Asimov

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

~General Omar N. Bradley

Wars frequently begin ten years before the first shot is fired.

~K. K. V. Casey

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

~Norman Cousins

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

~Henry Havelock Ellis

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 grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

~Napoleon Hill

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.

~John F. Kennedy

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

One does not create a human society on mounds of corpses.

~Louis Lecoin

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

~Jose Narosky

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.

~Herbert V. Prochnow

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes...can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.

~John F. Kennedy

[War] can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.

~John F. Kennedy

We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

~General Omar N. Bradley

There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders.

~Ralph Bunche

Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.

~Spinoza

Conflict cannot survive without your participation.

~Dr. Wayne Dyer

Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

~Abraham Flexner

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?

~Benjamin Franklin

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

~Benjamin Franklin

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

~Havelock Ellis

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

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

~Simone Weil

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

~Simone Weil

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.

~Benjamin Disraeli

Force without judgement falls on its own weight.

~Horace

Dress it as we may...huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?

~Douglas Jerrold

War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.

~Charles Evans Hughes

Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.

~John Andrew Holmes

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

We have all taken risks in the making of war. Isn't it time that we should take risks to secure peace?

~J. Ramsay MacDonald

We shall never be able to effect physical disarmament until we have succeeded in effecting moral disarmament.

~J. Ramsay MacDonald

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

~Albert Einstein

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

~Howard Thurman

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

~Agatha Christie

We have guided missiles and misguided men.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle...your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am a steadfast follower of the doctrine of non-violence which was first preached by Lord Buddha, whose divine wisdom is absolute...

~Dalai Lama

[Iraqis] know we own their country...It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need.

~U.S. Brig. General William Looney

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

~Albert Einstein

I went into the Army believing that if you want peace you must prepare for war. I now believe that if you prepare thoroughly for war you will get it.

~Sir John Frederick Maurice

[Iraqis] know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now.

~U.S. Brig. General William Looney

Force is the weapon of the weak.

~Ammon Hennacy

The price of empire is America’s soul, and that price is too high.

~Sen. J. William Fulbright (Ark.)

There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong.

~Daniel O'Connell

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

~Donald Rumsfeld

O peace! how many wars were waged in thy name.

~Alexander Pope

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.

~George W. Bush

If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road.

~George W. Bush

I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.

~George H. W. Bush

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

~Jose Narosky

The reason we start a war is to fight a war, win a war, thereby causing no more war.

~George W. Bush

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.

~James Madison

War is the most striking instance of the failure of intelligence to master the problem of human relationships.

~Harry Elmer Barnes

We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.

~General Omar N. Bradley

The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.

~Harry Emerson Fosdick

The 1st panacea of a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the 2nd is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; a permanent ruin.

~Ernest Hemingway

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.

~Ludwig von Mises

War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.

~Ludwig von Mises

War...is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.

~Ludwig von Mises

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.

~Ludwig von Mises

To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.

~Ludwig von Mises

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.

~Ludwig von Mises

The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.

~Ludwig von Mises

Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.

~Ludwig von Mises

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

~Ludwig von Mises

Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.

~Ludwig von Mises

Men are fighting...because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.

~Ludwig von Mises

If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.

~Ludwig von Mises

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

~Ludwig von Mises

If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.

~Ludwig von Mises

Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.

~Ludwig von Mises

Only one thing can conquer war--that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation...

~Ludwig von Mises

Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.

~Ludwig von Mises

The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

~A. J. P. Taylor

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

~Carl P. G. von Clausewitz

We...are not really free if we can't control our own government and its policies. And we will never do that if we remain ignorant.

~Charley Reese

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

~General Omar N. Bradley

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

~James Madison

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

~John F. Kennedy

If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another...after the war is on.

~Senator Robert M. La Follette

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak...

~John Adams

Power always thinks...that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

~John Adams

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

~Marcus Aurelius

Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.

~Thomas Jefferson

Oh! it is excellent to have a giant's strengh; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.

~William Shakespeare

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

~Mark Twain

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

~Voltaire

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.

~General Thomas S. Power

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: deliberate, continued, and dishonest; but the myth: persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

~John F. Kennedy (Yale commencement add., 6/11/62)

The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.

~Marcus Tullius Cicero

Freedom is to understand, and to be unbounded by that freedom.

~Juan C. Mustelier

Man can be human only in a climate in which he can expect that he and his children will live to see the next year, and many more years to come.

~from "The Heart of Man" (1964) by Erich Fromm

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

~R. Buckminster Fuller

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

~Chris Hedges

Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.

~Elias Canetti

"Rules of engagement" are a set of guidelines for murder.

~Dr. Theresa Whitehurst

The soldier's main enemy is not the opposing soldier, but his own commander.

~Ramman Kenoun

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that's just a fact.

~Donald Rumsfeld (Pentagon meeting, 4/17/03)

The occupation and robbery of a nation occurs under the illusion of freeing its citizens from brutal oppression.

~Ramman Kenoun

A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.

~German proverb

You can’t legislate morality.

~Jesse Ventura (State Governer of Minnesota)

The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests.

~Charley Reese

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

~H. L. Mencken

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

~Albert Camus

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

~William Pitt

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

~Johann W. Von Goethe

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

~Voltaire

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

~Tacitus

Peace and not war is the father of all things.

~Ludwig Von Mises

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking.

~Ludwig Von Mises

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.

~Thomas Paine

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

~Noam Chomsky

...war doesn't need more participants. It needs fewer participants.

~Michael Badnarik

...no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

~Abraham Flexner

No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war.

~Calvin Coolidge

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.

~General Douglas MacArthur

The politicians in this world... have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes.

~Charley Reese

If [America] becomes militant, it will be because its people choose to become such; it will be because they think that war and warlikeness are desirable.

~William Graham Sumner (1903)

Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.

~Ludwig von Mises

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

~Thomas Mann

To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.

~Ludwig von Mises

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

~Frank Chodorov

I believe in only one thing: liberty, but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

~H. L. Mencken

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

~Ludwig von Mises

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

~General William Tecumseh Sherman

Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.

~Congressman Ron Paul

The Construct

20041227

The emperor's same, old clothes

20041226

Is this a joke, or did the world take leave of its senses? Perhaps, nobody cared..... Yeh, thats probably it....

Blog Archive