Quotes About War

It stretches credulity to try to explain away our inconsistencies in working with al-Qaeda in Egypt, Libya, and Syria while being diligently at war with the same group. Pursuing these contradictory policies makes no sense.

Even today, authors who claim correctly, as Patrick Buchanan does in his book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, that both World War I and World War II were "unnecessary wars" are shunned and ridiculed. Such a suggestion is so at odds with how history is taught in most US schools that many people are unwilling to even consider arguments backing Buchanan's conclusion.

Today both the Democratic and Republican parties support the expansive US Empire as well as the neoconservatives' agitation for a perpetual Global War on Terror. The disagreement we hear between the two parties is only regarding management style and is designed to use political failures and unintended consequences to enhance the power and influence of one party relative to the other.

To decrease the frequency and magnitude of war, those who are conditioned to die in them or pay for them are the ones who must decide they will neither support the wars nor be victimized by them.

But the war proponents tried desperately to continue the glorification of war by praising anyone who had been sent off to war or even just put on a uniform. Troops and veterans were placed on pedestals as great heroes—warriors who had saved us from some imagined modern-day Hitler.

My indirect exposure to war for most of my life constantly pushed me toward seeking, and becoming comfortable with, a pro-peace philosophy, as well as refusing to be intimidated by the false charges that such a position is unpatriotic, un-American, and expresses a lack of concern for military personnel.

In the last 13 years, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when compared to our two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, have not resulted in staggering numbers of Americans killed. But the deaths of non-Americans as a consequence of our sanctions, invasions, and bombings are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. We may not be counting, but the Muslim world is. Recipients of such violence and their families have long memories.

For the first three centuries, every Christian writer who discussed killing said that all killing was prohibited--whether in war, capital punishment, or abortion. Whether or not the early church was correct in thinking that is what Jesus intended, it is perfectly clear that in the one case where Jesus was explicitly called upon to affirm the Old Testament's call for capital punishment, he refused.

The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another, drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be said, that the judgments of the Lord are righteous altogether.

Before I die I have given myself the modest task of convincing the Christians in America that as Christians we have a problem with war. I am not expecting the vast majority of Christians to be pacifists or even just warriors. I simply want them to see that there is a profound tension between our worship of a crucified messiah and the support of war.

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

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.

It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home for Christmas.

We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

Some of your countrymen were unable to distinguish between their native dislike for war and the stainless patriotism of those who suffered its scars. But there has been a rethinking and now we can say to you, and say as a nation, thank you for your courage.

Some say it will bring war to the heavens, but its purpose is to deter war, in the heavens and on earth.

The war in Vietnam threatened to tear our society apart, and the political and philosophical disagreements that separated each side continue, to some extent. It's been said that these memorials reflect a hunger for healing.

War is our only recourse. There is no other remedy.

Referring to Marx's thesis the the proletariat had no fatherland, he said that the epoch of national wars was over, and that the current struggle was an imperialist war.

El toro impávido ante la lengua de los muertos / la muerte derramada bajo los cascos implacables / la impiedad del caballo entre el dolor de las lámparas / y el amor mío por el sueño / deslumbrado de pronto / por el remordimiento. (Descubrimiento del Guernica)

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)

It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too.