Quotes About War

We spend an inordinate amount of money of the federal budget on the machinery of war, and neglect our kids in the process, and it's not OK

None of us ever thought to write a song about all the shit that was going on back then: war, revolution, civil war, turmoil. Our songs were trying to take you someplace else.

THE BASIC CON Those who can't find anything to live for, always invent something to die for. Then they want the rest of us to die for it, too.

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.

Disease is war with the laws of our being, and all war, as a great general has said, is hell.

War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it is easier to send an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves....

Too easily have historians imputed war chiefly to man's savage past, and have looked upon war as an incursion of so-called primitive nomads, the 'have-nots,' against normally 'peaceful' centers of industry and trade. Nothing could be further from the historic truth. War and domination, rather than peace and co-operation, were ingrained in the original structure of the ancient city.

Though the moral onus for promoting war has made the munitions manufacturers the scapegoats, the fact is that the paper-profits of war equally enrich every other part of the national economy, even agriculture; for war, with its unparalleled consumption of goods, and its unparalleled wastes, temporarily overcomes the chronic defect of an expanding technology-'over-production.' War, by restoring scarcity, is necessary on classic capitalist terms to ensure profit.

A city that is of one man only is no city, says Haemon in Sophocles' 'Antigone.' Only where differences are valued and opposition tolerated can be transmuted into dialectic: so in its internal economy the city is a place-to twist Blake's dictum-that depresses corporeal and promotes mental war.

If civilized society has not yet outgrown war, as it outgrew less respectable manifestations of primitive magic, like child sacrifice and cannibalism, it is partly because the city itself in its structure and institutions continued to give war both a durable concrete form and a magical pretext for existence. Beneath all war's technical improvements lay an irrational belief, still deeply imbedded in the collective unconscious: only by wholesale human sacrifice can the community be saved.

Patently, a chronic state of war was a heavy price to pay for the boasted benefits of 'civilization.' Permanent improvement could come only by exorcising the myth of divine kingship, demounting its too-powerful megamachine and abating its ruthless exploitation of man-power.

The production of the atom bomb was in fact crucial to the building of the new megamachine, little though anyone at the time had that larger objective in mind. For it was the success of this project that gave the scientists a central place in the new power complex and resulted eventually in the invention of many other instruments that have rounded out and universalized the system of control first established to meet only the exigencies of war.

Unlike any earthbound activity, space exploration is limitless, and the technological demands it makes are insatiable. In this sense, spatial adventurism has indeed the sinister advantages of war: all the more effectively because it recovers for popular consumption the archaic sentiments that originally led to the New World exploration of the sixteenth century and later.

War, in our country, ought never to be resorted to but when it is clearly justifiable and necessary; so much so as not to require the aid of logic to convince our understanding nor the ardour of eloquence to inflame our passions. There are many reasons why this country should never resort to it but for causes the most urgent and necessary.

Useful as a war against France, undertaken by the Government against the will of the people would be for our revolutionary development, just so dangerous must be the effect upon our democratic development of a war supported by blind popular enthusiasm.

The President regards the Japanese as a brave people; but courage, though useful in time of war, is subordinate to knowledge of arts; hence, courage without such knowledge is not to be highly esteemed.

All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.

The anti-war politicians who have risen to power in Washington, London, Ottawa and Brussels have never had to explain why they were offering the persecuted people of Iraq nothing that was in any way more useful to them than the shoddy, outrageously ill-planned intervention that was on offer from Blair and Bush back in 2003.

Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized men.

Tell mother, tell mother, I died for my country... useless... useless.

The problem is that the Iraqi people are facing atrocities from both sides - Zarqawi and also the American troops at times. The Zarqawi groups uses car bombs, the Americans use other bombs. You also know what they do in the prisons.

Ted Cruz, who uses phrases like 'carpet-bombing' the people of ISIS and who said, after the incidents in Paris, that we need a war president, is using fear mongering and hate speech. As a citizen of the world, I'm very concerned that this kind of behavior is being cheered on by anyone. It only brings more pain and suffering.

I am not trying to say I'm a genius, but 'Underground' was the strongest attack there has been on Milosevic. It is about a man who locks his friends in a cellar for 40 years and convinces them that the war is still going on. He uses them, but they still think he is a great guy. And this was shown in every cinema in Serbia.

To win the war on terror, we must know who our friends are and where our enemies are hiding. We can't continue fighting terrorism using the same foreign policy blueprints that were in place before September 11th.