Revealing Quotes from the Ruling Class - Click Here
Quotations Regarding War
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
– Edward Abbey
Where are your husbands, your brothers, your sons? Why must they destroy one another and all that they (and we) have created? Who benefits by this bloody nightmare? Only a minority of war profiteers. ...Since the men cannot speak, you must. Working women of the warring countries, unite!
The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
– Ambrose Bierce
Every patriot believes his country better than any other
country . . . In its active manifestation—it is fond
of killing—patriotism would be well enough if it were
simply defensive, but it is also aggressive . . . Patriotism
deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the
interests of a whole to the interests of a part . . . Patriotism
is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a
stone."
– Ambrose Bierce
A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force.
No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.
(Read More,,,)
The question is not what pacifism has achieved throughout
history, but what has war achieved?
In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments.
War is the health of the state.
– Randolph Bourne,
The State (Read More)
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without
conscience. 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.
– Omar Bradley
Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our
country and our people, and neither do we.
– George W.
Bush
Our nation is somewhat sad, but we’re angry. There’s
a certain level of blood lust, but we won’t let it drive
our reaction. We’re steady, clear-eyed and patient,
but pretty soon we’ll have to start displaying scalps.
– George W.
Bush
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,
easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
– General Smedley
Butler (Read More)
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service
in the country's most agile military force, the Marines. I
served in all ranks from second lieutenant to major general.
And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class
muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I
am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession
I never had an original thought until I left the service.
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while
I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with
everyone in the military service.
Thus I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for
American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba
a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect
revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central
American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record
of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the
international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912.
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests
in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit
companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that
Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would
say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and
promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given
Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate
a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on
three continents.
General
Smedley Butler 1935 (Read More)
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight
their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village
and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them
with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each
other.
– Thomas Carlyle
Beware of the leader, who strikes the war drum in order to transfer the citizens into patriotic glow, patriotism is indeed a double-sided sword. It makes the blood so boldly, like it constricts the intellect. And if the striking of the war drum reached a fiebrige height and the blood is cooking and hating, and the intellect is dismissed, the leader doesn't need to reject the citizens rights. The citizens, cought by anxiety and blinded through patriotism, will subordinate all their rights to the leader and this even with happy courage. Why do I know that? I know it, because this is, what I did. And I am Gajus Julius Cäsar.
War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the
death of others on the altar of their greed.
– John Cory
There is no morality in war. Morality is the privilege of those judging from the distance. War is only death and destruction...
The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man
can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose
trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned
the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the
boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest
duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart —
and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without
the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his
ruler gives the word.
– Clarence Darrow,
Resist Not Evil
...to refuse to countenance a war that dares not speak its true name ... you can no longer mumble the old excuse, "we didn't know"; and now that you do know, can you continue to feign ignorance, or content yourselves with mere token utterance of horrified sympathy?
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder...The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic.
Fascism is on the march today in America. Millionaires are marching to the tune. It will come in this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive forces... A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America's largest financial corporations told me point blank that if the progressive trend of the Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism to America.
Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles
of mankind.
– Albert Einstein
(attributed)
Wars will stop when men refuse to fight
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every
rocket fired, signifies in a 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 its money
alone—it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
– Dwight Eisenhower,
Speech (1953)
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
– Dwight D.
Eisenhower (Read entire Military Industrial Complex speech here)
There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security,
but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that
illusory goal through arms alone.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as
one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
– Dwight D.
Eisenhower
War is delightful to those who have not experienced
it.
– Erasmus
The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity,
personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence,
murder, stealing, lying, cruelty—all these are washed
away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most
people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing
and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public
acclaim. You cannot, when the war is proclaimed, pull a switch
and turn the community from the moral code of peace to that
of war and then, when the armistice is signed, pull a nother
switch and reconnect the whole society with its old moral
regulations again. Thousands of people of all ranks who have
found a relish in the morals of war come back to you with
these rudimentary instincts controlling their behavior while
thousands of others, trapped in a sort of no man's land between
these two moralities, come back to you poisoned by cynicism.
—John T. Flynn,
As We Go Marching
Never has there been a good war or a bad peace.
– Benjamin Franklin
Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.
– Benjamin Franklin
This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would
remain in the army.
– Frederick
the Great
You believe you are dying for the fatherland - you die for some industrialists.
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust
[our own] government statements.
– Senator James
W. Fulbright
To criticize one's country is to do it a service .... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.
– Senator James
W. Fulbright
Either war is obsolete or men are.
– R. Buckminster
Fuller
Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.
– R. Buckminster
Fuller
War remains the decisive human failure.
– John Kenneth
Galbraith
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and
the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under
the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and
democracy?
– Mahatma Gandhi
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Naturally, the common people don't want war ... but after
all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy,
and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along,
whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice,
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism
and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every
country.
– Hermann Goering
There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance.
– Goethe
The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected
by a huge military force is not the America of the people,
but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and
exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle
to the grave. No less pathetic is it that so few people realize
that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed
the road to universal slaughter.
– Emma Goldman
Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements
of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the
national revenue. Almost nothing is spent on education, art,
literature and science compared with the amount devoted to
militarism in times of peace, while in times of war everything
else is set at naught; all life stagnates, all effort is curtailed;
the very sweat and blood of the masses are used to feed this
insatiable monster--militarism. Under such circumstances,
it must become more arrogant, more aggressive, more bloated
with its own importance. If for no other reason, it is out
of surplus energy that militarism must act to remain alive;
therefore it will seek an enemy or create one artificially.
In this civilized purpose and method, militarism is sustained
by the state, protected by the laws of the land, is fostered
by the home and the school, and glorified by public opinion.
In other words, the function of militarism is to kill. It
cannot live except through murder.
– Emma Goldman (Read More Emma Goldman)
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to
die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing
sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for
no good reason.
– Ernest Hemmingway
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
(more from Abbie Hoffman)
Old men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and
die.
– Herbert C.
Hoover
War is as much a punishment to the punisher as it is
to the sufferer.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us,
that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
– Thomas Jefferson
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when
the government fears the people, there is liberty.
– Thomas Jefferson
If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of
every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with
conquest.
– Thomas Jefferson
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
The first casualty when war comes is the truth.
– Sen. Hiram
Johnson
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships,
are all symbols of human failure.
– Lyndon B Johnson
The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance
of the people.
– Frank Kent
We must ask just what it is that makes the nation safe and secure. If we ruin our economy to engage in an accelerated arms race, are we really any stronger? When we demoralize and polarize millions of jobless, homeless and impoverished Americans, it seems to me that we are dangerously weak at the very fabric of our society. In this sense, the nuclear arms race breed insecurity, not strength."
A bayonet is a tool with a worker on both ends.
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.
Military glory--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy...
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary
spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal
hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.
– Martin Luther
King, Jr.
The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must
be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
– Martin Luther
King, Jr.
Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
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
Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
– James Madison
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual
warfare.
– James Madison
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in
the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
– James Madison
All men having power ought to be mistrusted.
– James Madison
The very existence of nuclear weapons is an assault on the human psyche. People have massive resistance against painful information, and it's not surprising because it is dealing with the extinction of the species. It's as if our society were under a spell, sleepwalking its way to destruction.
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
– Groucho Marx
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young
men to die in.
– George McGovern
It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy
that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was
bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria
and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
– General Douglas
MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951
Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificually
induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda
of fear.
– General Douglas
MacArthur
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it
Is a young man bound to serve his country in war? In addition
to his legal duty there is perhaps also a moral duty, but
it is very obscure. What is called his country is only its
government and that government consists merely of professional
politicians, a parasitical and anti-social class of men. They
never sacrifice themselves for their country. They make all
wars, but very few of them ever die in one. If it is the duty
of a young man to serve his country under all circumstances
then it is equally the duty of an enemy young man to serve
his. Thus we come to a moral contradiction and absurdity so
obvious that even clergymen and editorial writers sometimes
notice it.
– H.L. Mencken,
Minority Report
In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a
revolutionary act.
– George Orwell
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented
not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal
maniac.
– George Orwell
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities
committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for
not even hearing about them.
– George Orwell
That there are men in all countries who get their living by
war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking
as it is true...
– Thomas Paine
War is never economically beneficial except for those in position
to profit from war expenditures.
– Congressman
Ron Paul
The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the
world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.
– Major Ralph
Peters, US Military
A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.
What is more immoral than war?
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.
All wars are fought for money.
– Socrates
One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic.
The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important
to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.
– Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
– Alexander
Solzhenitsyn
National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing
the people.
– Senator John
Taylor
The working masses of men and women, they and they alone,
are responsible for everything that takes place, the good
things and the bad things. True enough, they suffer most from
a war, but it is their apathy, craving for authority, etc.,
that is most responsible for making wars possible. It follows
of necessity from this responsibility that the working masses
of men and women, they and they alone, are capable of establishing
lasting peace.
– Wilhelm Reich,
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
They have pillaged the world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of "empire." They make a desert and call it "peace".
National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing the people.
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable
meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of
the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation
of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed,
and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is
what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed.
Patriotism is slavery.
– Leo Tolstoy,
Christianity and Patriotism
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what
is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.
– Mark Twain
Look at you in war...There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war.
– Mark Twain
All war is based on deception.
– Sun Tzu
How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?
War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
– Voltaire
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities
– Voltaire
Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.
– George Washington
A free government with an uncontrolled power of military
conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction
and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.
– Daniel Webster,
Speech in the House of Representatives, January
14, 1814
Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is
civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all
over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of
their government and have gone to war, and millions have been
killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that
people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty
and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem
is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty
thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the
country. That's our problem.
– Howard Zinn
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing
innocent people.
– Howard Zinn |
