quotations about war
War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.
DON DELILLO
End Zone
War is a monster with snaky locks, and fiery bloodshot eyes, and harpy claws, passing over fair fields and leaving its footprints in burning villages, dying men, weeping wives and children, and needs to be seen by those who so eagerly clamour for it at every opportunity. The sight of that fearful phantom, girt round with skulls, chains reeking with blood and desolation and ruin in its track, would stop their eagerness for it, unless under real compulsion.
M. D. CONWAY
attributed, Platt's Essays
War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
On War
There's this tradition that The Iliad is about war. It's very easy to support that tradition by picking out four or five main scenes. But when one reads the entirety of the epic, it is unambiguously clear at every turn that the poem is evoking the blighting effect of this war on every single participant in it. Old men, civilians, children, captive women or wives, as well as the warriors, like Achilles--they all decry it. Every adjective evokes the destruction and tragedy of war. It's literally a war of tears.
CAROLINE ALEXANDER
"War is Unavoidable--and Other Hard Lessons from Homer's Iliad", National Geographic, January 10, 2016
when a great war has cut off the young men of a nation it never can be told thereafter what losses of scholars, poets, thinkers and great designers the country and the world have suffered.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
letter to Mary Hewson, January 27, 1783
Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war. The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term "mankind" feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto
Even when just, was is the worst necessity. The method is savage, and it recoils terribly, as much on the victor as the vanquished.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
The decision to use military hard power is a serious one and never taken lightly. The military establishment does everything in its power to mitigate risk in a battlespace that can only be described as "murky" because, no matter the amount of intelligence or planning, the only certainty is uncertainty.
ROBERT MAKROS
"'Clean war' is the unicorn of armed conflict", The Hill, March 31, 2017
Such is the nature of war that, at the top, there is hardly any aspect of human behavior, individual and collective, which does not impinge on its conduct. And which, as a result, those in charge do not have to take into account and act upon.
MARTIN VAN CREVELD
"Why the best teacher of war is war", OUP blog, April 9, 2017
So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains.
DORIS LESSING
The Four-Gated City
It makes no difference what men think of war.... War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
War ... has become impossible, except at the price of suicide.
IVAN STANISLAVOVICH BLOCH
The Future of War
War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
The war is being conducted under a conspiracy of silence. It does not mean it does not exist, only that it is kept quiet.
URI MISGAV
"Israel Is in a Civil War, Not a War of Brothers", Haaretz
Wars start like this. Cultures gamble decadence and death will win them rebirth, watch themselves sliding into it, knowing it's an all-or-nothing bet.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World Revisited
The stock market tends to rally whenever the U.S. begins military operations overseas. Does that mean that investors prefer war? Not exactly. But they positively abhor uncertainty, and that's what typically characterizes the market environment in the weeks prior to the U.S. military becoming involved in a foreign military operation. Much of that uncertainty gets resolved soon after U.S.-led hostilities begin, and that's why the stock market typically soars in response.
MARK HULBERT
"War Is Hell--but Not for The Stock Market", Barron's, April 20, 2017
In the days of peace every precaution should be taken to insure that there are no forces making for war. Just as we now forbid the trafficking in certain drugs, in the sale of poisons, just as we forbid the making of any imprint that suggests a coin or currency, just as experience has demonstrated that men may not make profit out of certain things because of the danger of abuse, so in the gravest of all dangers laws should be passed taking from those who might gain from war or preparations for war every hope that advantage could come to them by such a calamity.
FREDERIC CLEMSON HOWE
Why War
War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.
BENITO MUSSOLINI
"The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism"