Quotes about War

If one is to win all battles, one is assured to lose the war.

The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
     Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
               Choose:
     For we meet by one or the other.

"A generation that hates war will not bring peace. A generation that loves peace will bring peace." Seth

When one uses the simple monosyllabic 'France' one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When. . . we say 'France sent her troops to conquer Tunis'—we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and- blood men and women who are the true actors.. . if we had no such word as 'France' . . . then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: 'A few of...thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.' This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the 'few'? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey? Empire-building is done not by 'nations,' but by men. The problem before us is to discover the men, the active, interested minorities in each nation, who are directly interested in imperialism and then to analyze the reasons why the majorities pay the expenses and fight the wars.

if you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.

Whatever the problem, a gun is not the answer.  A gun is only the seed of more guns and the harvest will come.

If the government were obliged to come to the people for money instead of vice-versa, the people would keep government under control and operate their economy satisfactorily with prosperity and peace resulting. The peoples of the nations do not make war. For them peace is the natural and permanent order. Wars are planned and perpetrated by politicians and their diplomats; and the money power of government is the means by which the people are maneuvered into wars.

Are we defending life
when we just pick and choose
lives acceptable to lose
and which ones to defend?

BE what you wish to see reflected in the world. 
Love is made by being love. Peace is found only in being peace. 
See others as children. See how our collective being impacts them. 
What do you create? Love, Compassion, and Peace? Or Fear, War, and Hate?

Now, what I have told you is, is a war story. War stories aren't always about war, per se. They aren't about bombs and bullets and military maneuvers. They aren't about tactics, they aren't about foxholes and canteens. War stories, like any good story, is finally about the human heart. About the choices we make, or fail to make. The forfeitures in our lives. Stories are to console and to inspire and to help us heal. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. And a good war story, in my opinion, is a story that strikes you as important, not for war content, but for its heart content. The second reason I told you this story is that none of it's true. Or very little of it. It's - invented. No Ellroy, no Tip-Top Lodge, no pig factory, I'm trying to think of what else. I've never been to the Rainy River in my life. Uh, not even close to it. I haven't been within two hundred miles of the place. No boats. But, although the story I invented, it's still true, which is what fiction is all about. Uh, if I were to tell you the literal truth of what happened to me in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight, all I could tell you was that I played golf, and I worried about getting drafted. But that's a crappy story. Isn't it? It doesn't - it doesn't open any door to what I was feeling in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight. That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. The pig factory is there for those dreams of slaughter - they were quite real inside of me. And in my own heart, I was certainly on that rainy river, trying to decide what to do, whether to go to the war or not go to it, say no or say yes. The story is still true, even though on one level it's not; it's made up.

The point was not to pull a fast one, any more than, you know, Mark Twain is trying to pull a fast one in Huckleberry Finn. Stories make you believe, that's what dialogue is for, that's what plot is for, and character. It's there to make you believe it as you're reading it. You don't read Huckleberry Finn saying "This never happened, this never happened, this never happened, this never happened-" I mean, you don't do that, or go to The Godfather and say, you know, no horse head. I mean, you don't think that way; you believe. A verisimilitude and truth in that literal sense, to me, is ultimately irrelevant. What is relevant is the human heart.

There is usually an inverse relationship between the size of a weapon and the moral responsibility practiced by the user.

"We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom,

power without conscience.  We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount.  We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living."
-General Omar Nelson Bradley

Bless the upward hearts who find all war, all envy, and all regret to be unacceptable, especially inside themselves.

Men with purple hearts carry silver guns and they will kill a man for what his father has done.  But what my father did, I don't live it: no, I am not him.

The highest risk for war is where various economic interests are able to control foreign policy to promote their particular interests rather than the well-being and liberty of the individuals within a society.

We should learn from the war and welfare century that the greatest discovery in Western civilization was that liberty could be achieved only through the proper and effective limitation on the power of the state. It is this limitation on the power of the state which protects private property, a free-market economy, personal liberties and promotes a noninterventionist foreing policy, which, if coupled with a strong national defense, will bring peace and prosperity instead of war and welfare. It is not democracy per se which protects freedom.

By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, public opinion polls showed that over 80 percent of the American public was opposed to entering another European war. It took the dramatic event of the attack on Pearl Harbor to shift public opinion overwhelmingly to suppor our entry into the war. The public was unaware of the evidence that we now have that Roosevelt provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor and actually withheld information from the military commanders stationed there, which if furnished to them, would have probably prevented the attack.

We must learn to avoid war and develop a general will to peace. I believe the key to this development is to learn the truth about the real causes and effects of wars so that we can see through the false propaganda which is used by political leaders to convince us to go to war.

The study of the history of wars indicates that economic factors have always played a major role in starting wars, but rarely are these economic factors disclosed to the public as the reasons.

I would be amazed if a three-day campaign made a decisive difference," "[W]e did not do, in my view, enough damage to degrade it [Iraq's programs for weapons of mass destruction] for six months. It doesn't make any significant difference because in six months to a year they will be back to where they are and we cannot keep repeating these attacks. [. . .] At the end of the day what will be decisive is what the situation in the Middle East will be two to three years from now. If Saddam is still there, if he's rearming, if the sanctions are lifted, we will have lost, no matter what spin we put on it

(in response to the Clinton Administrations missle attacks on Iraq in 1998)

Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare:  when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.

[footnote read J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999, 58.]

Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, in My Lai:

Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter.  Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals.  There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired on Charlie Company all day, but they carried on.  They burnt down every house.  They raped woman and girls and then killed them.  They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps.  Pregnant woman had there stomachs slashed open and were left to die.  There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets.  There were mass executions.  Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machined-gunned in a ditch.  In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.

On both sides of a war, how many mothers must face the death of their sons because a politician will not face the death of one misguided opinion?

Let us never allow our defense to become aggression.  Also, let us never forget that there is no victor in war and there is no loser in peace.

There is no true love between neighbors, until war becomes peace.

"Don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can, while it still looks like you have a chance.  Chaos, civil war, we'll take our chances, Just take your puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your stupid politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go."

The Iranian Girl

There's a hole in the ground
A moving of earth, now made
A sad depression
Where once she played in
Puddle-rain
Splashing with the joy that comes
From child-like feet

The sound is still here
In the air, the breeze yet carrying
The secret laughter
That haunts the waking hours of those
Who've lost the way

How vain to think that
Memory can be erased

All will remember
No one escapes

I wonder if she saw it
The moment before
Her hair still flying free
The metal catching that last
Pure glint of sun

Did she hear the explosion
That made no sense
Did she feel
Her body come apart
And fall like dust, too soon

Does anyone ask
Whatever she felt, whatever she dreamed
Her dreaming time is gone
And no lofty word of God or
Glory will ever make it right

Dare to listen and you will
Hear her
Dare to open your eyes and see

The Iranian girl
No different
Like you, like me.

War, hatred, and violence all spring from one infernal idea: that one person, race, creed, or culture is better than another.

Countless deaths have occurred because of observed differences between men.  Unfathomable oceans of blood have been spilt because one man saw another to be evil, wrong, different, etc.  Yet, it is a commonly accepted fact that no Earthly man is perfect.  The world will know peace when we collectively look past the faults of our neighbors, and turn our eyes inward to the personal faults we must overcome.

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