War
399 quotes
Biography
"My voice is still for war."
"Instead of breaking that bridge, we should, if possible, provide another, that he may retire the sooner out of Europe."
"This is war. Have you heard about "good war"? I don't think anyone have heard about good war. It's a war, you always have casualties, you always have innocent people, people being killed by any means, no one can tell how..."
"If wars can be started with lies, they can be stopped by truth."
"I refused to continue in a war that was no longer in the service of the vital national interest of our people. ... We’ve been a nation too long at war. If you're 20 years old today, you have never known an America at peace."
"The distribution of the world's resources and the settled unity of the peoples of the world are ... one and the same thing, for behind all modern wars lies a fundamental economic problem. Solve that and wars will very largely cease."
"Of all the differences between the Old World and the New this is perhaps the most salient: Half the wars of Europe, half the troubles that have vexed European States, ... have arisen from theological differences or from the rival claims of church and state. This whole vast chapter of debate and strife has remained virtually unopened in the United States."
"Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother, just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up — take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now."
"Wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war."
"The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized."
"War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with. ... But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization."
"Our next war will be fought for the highest interests of our country and of mankind. This will invest it with importance in the world's history. "World power or downfall" will be our rallying cry."
"Just for a word—"neutrality," a word which in war-time had so often been disregarded—just for a scrap of paper, Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her."
"Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography."
"L'affaire Herzegovinienne ne vaut pas les os d'un fusilier poméranien."
"Lieber Spitzkugeln als Spitzreden."
"Ich sehe in unserm Bundesverhältnisse ein Gebrechen Preussens, welches wir früher oder später ferro et igne werden heilen müssen."
"[The great questions of the day] are not decided by speeches and majority votes, but by blood and iron."
"No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war."
"War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallisation of past force."
"It is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures."
"What a place to plunder!"
"War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided."
"War will make corpses of us all."
"It is magnificent, but it is not war."