Quotes About War

In short, it may be said that on paper the obligations to settle international disputes peacefully are now so comprehensive and far-reaching that it is almost impossible for a state to resort to war without violating one or more solemn treaty obligations.

In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.

In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war.

In our modern world of interdependent nations, hardly any state can wage war successfully without raising loans and buying war materials of every kind in the markets of other nations.

He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.

It is because I believe that it is in the power of such nations to lead the world back into the paths of peace that I propose to devote myself to explaining what, in my opinion, can and should be done to banish the fear of war that hangs so heavily over the world.

Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. "Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, 'You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours . . . Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance?' "23

for the Germans, this moment was exactly what they had been hoping for. Their master plan to send Lenin to Petrograd to take Russia out of the war was paying off even better than they had imagined.

the German ambassador in Copenhagen had a bright idea. He suggested to the Foreign Ministry that the best way to use the Russian Revolution to take Russia completely out of the war was to encourage its political extremists, especially those in exile, to return and spread chaos in their home country. The man at the head of everyone's list was Lenin.

Do not imagine, comrades, that I am simply looking for a revolutionary form of justice. We have no concern about justice at this hour! We are at war, on the front where the enemy is advancing, and the fight is to the death."3

Hundreds of thousands of men from both sides were drawn into a battle of attrition on a scale so immense that neither Germany nor France (nor even its ally Great Britain) could ever look on the war, or even the nature of war itself, the same way again.

The war was a disease that all the Great Powers of Europe had carried in their political DNA, as it were. Now it was up to America, and Woodrow Wilson, to point the way to the cure.

By the winter of 1916, German civilians were starving, even starving to death. Unless the war ended very soon, Germany faced catastrophe even if not a single Allied soldier advanced another step.

In my view the end of the war will be unforeseeable because—despite all that can be said to the contrary—the power and resources of the United States are very great."36

A steady flow of loans from the leading banks on Wall Street, led by J.P. Morgan, had enabled the British, French, and Russians to purchase what they needed to sustain the war effort as their gold reserves dwindled from larger and larger war purchases.

Lenin's urging, had repudiated the entirety of Russia's foreign debt, from both the war and before the war: almost nine billion dollars

concentration of wealth in capitalist countries must inevitably lead to war. That intense concentration—Britain, France, Germany, and the United States together, Lenin noted, controlled nearly 80 percent of the world's financial capital—had reduced the possibility for fresh profits in capitalist countries themselves, including the United States.

Once lead this people into war," Wilson ruminated, "and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance . . .

Wilson worried that the Constitution itself would not survive: "a nation can't put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it has never been done."13

One of the votes against war came from the very first woman ever to sit in the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin

now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, making a renewal of war all but impossible.

To Wilson, however, it would be worth the sacrifice. By entering the war, America was also transforming the conflict from a competition for empire and national interests into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and to secure mankind's hopes for future peace.

Howard Coffin, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, declared, "Twentieth-century war demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with three to five parts of the sweat of the men in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms"—

The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson's failure to support Japan's highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.