Quotes about War

War & Peace, Violence & Nonviolence
War does not determine who is right - only who is left. ~Bertrand Russell

Join the Army! Travel to exotic, distant lands. Meet exciting, unusual people, and kill them. ~Full Metal Jacket

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. ~John F. Kennedy

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. ~David Friedman

"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. ~James Morrow

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. ~Robert E. Lee, in a letter to his wife, 1864

Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him. ~M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter

War would end if the dead could return. ~Stanley Baldwin

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley

I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?" ~Eve Merriam

Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. ~Colman McCarthy, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. ~Voltaire, War

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. ~Abraham Flexner

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. ~John F. Kennedy

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how? ~Joan Baez

I couldn't help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. ~Ronald Reagan, 1985

[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war. ~Isaac Asimov

The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst. ~Henry Fosdick

There was never a good war or a bad peace. ~Benjamin Franklin

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth. ~Mark Twain

It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the senate. ~George McGovern

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. ~George McGovern

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. ~Jean-Paul Sartre

Draft beer; not people. ~UnknownThe release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. ~Albert Einstein

You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time. ~Albert Einstein

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "no" to war. For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses. ~Louis Lecoin

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars. ~William Westmoreland

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. ~Ulysses S. Grant

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the name of peaceThey waged the warsAin't they got no shame~Nikki Giovanni

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. ~Ernest Hemingway

War makes thieves and peace hangs them. ~George Herbert

You can no more win a war that you can win an earthquake. ~Jeanette Rankin

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come. ~Carl Sandburg

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights"

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. ~Michael Servetus

The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people. ~Gerome Gragni and James Rado, 1967

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace. ~Gladstone

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. ~Herbert Hoover

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. ~Havelock Ellis

Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong? ~Holly Near

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots. ~Napoleon Bonaparte

If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. ~Pentagon official explaining why the U.S. military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War

The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war. ~Vera Brittain, 1964

The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service. ~Albert Einstein

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. ~Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~John Stewart Mill

We challenge the culture of violence when we ourselves act in the certainty that violence is no longer acceptable, that it's tired and outdated no matter how many cling to it in the stubborn belief that it still works and that it's still valid. ~Gerard Vanderhaar

The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out. ~Chinese proverb

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? ~Alan Paton

There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed. ~Gil Bailie

In violence we forget who we are. ~Mary McCarthy

It is clear that the way to heal society of its violence...and lack of love is to replace the pyramid of domination with the circle of equality and respect. ~Manitonquat

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. ~Dave Barry

I believe everybody in the world should have guns. Citizens should have bazookas and rocket launchers too. I believe that all citizens should have their weapons of choice. However, I also believe that only I should have the ammunition. Because frankly, I wouldn't trust the rest of the goobers with anything more dangerous than string. ~Scott Adams

I will not carry a gun.... I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even hari-kari if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun! ~Hawkeye, M*A*S*H, "Officer of the Day"

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand. ~George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it. ~George Bernard Shaw

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private citizens will occasionally kill theirs. ~Elbert Hubbard

Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. ~Josef de Maistre

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nonviolence doesn't always work - but violence never does. ~Madge Micheels-Cyrus

In some cases nonviolence requires more militancy than violence. ~Cesar Chavez

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. ~Mother Teresa

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. ~Friedrich Nietzsche View Reflections, a painting by Lee Teter, which captures a heart-wrenching moment at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Environment & Nature:

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. ~Native American proverb

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. ~Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau

The sun, the moon, and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands. ~Havelock Ellis

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. ~Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all. ~Robert Orben

It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours. ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990

We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable. For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on Earth - pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds. ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996

The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies. ~Al Gore

Modern technologyOwes ecologyAn apology.~Alan M. Eddison

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. ~Chief Seattle, 1855

In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. ~Paul Brooks, The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971

You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I was born where there were no enclosures and everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. ~Ten Bears for the Comanche at The Council of Medicine Lodge Creek, 1867

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites. ~William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990

When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded. ~Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985

Worldwide practice of Conservation and the fair and continued access by all nations to the resources they need are the two indispensable foundations of continuous plenty and of permanent peace. ~Gifford Pinchot

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. ~Albert Schweitzer, quoted in James Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer

To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance. ~Buddha

Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. ~Henrik Tikkanen

Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. ~Ian McHarg

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. ~Edward O. Wilson

Why was man created on the last day? So that he can be told, when pride possesses him: God created the gnat before thee. ~The Talmud

Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind. ~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978

God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west...keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. ~Mahatma Gandhi

I'm not an environmentalist. I'm an Earth warrior. ~Darryl Cherney, quoted in Smithsonian, April 1990

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend? ~Robert Redford, Yosemite National Park dedication, 1985

Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it. ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, July 1972

Newspapers: dead trees with information smeared on them. ~Horizon, "Electronic Frontier"

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers. ~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago. ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. ~Ralph Nader, quoted in Linda Botts, ed., Loose Talk, 1980

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. ~Aldo Leopold

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. ~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958

There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet. ~Brooke Medicine Eagle

The packaging for a microwavable "microwave" dinner is programmed for a shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill dead-time of centuries. ~David Wann, Buzzworm, November 1990

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. ~Henry David Thoreau

So bleak is the picture...that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. ~Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978

The sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away. ~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990

Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast. ~William Rathje, The Economist, 8 September 1990

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress. ~John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957

And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess." ~Art Buchwald, 1970

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man. ~Arnold Toynbee

In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment. ~Richard Wilkinson

The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people. ~William Ralph Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931

The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows. ~Paul A. Samuelson, Newsweek, 12 June 1967

U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks. ~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990

Water flows uphill towards money. ~Anonymous, saying in the American West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986

If people in a Third World nation have no pure water for drinking, is it still all right to use First World water for swimming pools? ~Sara Ebenreck, Catholic World, July-August 1990

The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted from the time that he's on earth. In other words, if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to live. That's the way I look at recreation. That's why I'll be a big conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can. ~George Bush, quoted in Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1988

For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death. ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. ~Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of E.B. White, 1977

The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages. ~Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, États et empires de la lune, 1656

Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work. ~Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland

A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very existence. But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says - go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no time for idle whining. ~David Brin

The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself. ~Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907

Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they're killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? "Sweetheart, let's make up. Have this deceased squirrel." ~The Washington Post

Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations. ~David Gerrold

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars...and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are. ~Osho

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. ~Albert Einstein

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature. ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1963

Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat - glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning? ~Frank N. Ikard, North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Houston, March 1968

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet. ~Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. ~John Muir, 1913, in L.M. Wolfe, ed., John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938

How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! ~Emily Dickinson, letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper, 1880

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness.~Kahlil Gibran

How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, November 1939

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy. ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899

We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void. The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated land which is occupied "only" by wild animals. Places not used by us are "wastes." Areas not occupied by us are "desolate." Could the desolation be in the soul of man? ~John A. Livingston, in Borden Spears, ed., Wilderness Canada, 1970

It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood. ~Bernand De Voto, Fortune, June 1947

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. ~Stewart L. Udall, quoted in William Schwarz, ed., Voices for the Wilderness, 1969No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means. ~Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974