Antiwar Quotes

As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.) ~ Christopher Hitchens

Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms. ~ Ron Paul

It would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war. ~ Hermann Hesse

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself. ~ Lao-Tzu

One can ... never create [freedom] by an invading force. ~ Maximilien Robespierre

I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land. ~ Mark Twain

All war represents a failure of diplomacy. ~ Tony Benn

John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of "antiwar," which he felt, and I'm paraphrasing him here, was like being "anti-food" or "anti-sex," since war was such an essential element of human experience. ~ Mark Bowden

Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly. ~ Robert M. La Follette

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards. ~ E. M. Forster

I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. ~ Sun Tzu

Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons. ~ Tony Benn

We have one of our priests in prison right now, Steve Kelly, for his antiwar actions, and three of us in the community are forbidden to visit him because we're all convicted felons. ~ Daniel Berrigan

It is useless to attack a man who could not be controlled even if conquered, while failure would leave us in an even worse position. ~ Thucydides

You've got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you're going to hit civilians. ~ Barry Goldwater

In modern war there is no such thing as victor and vanquished ... There is only a loser, and the loser is mankind. ~ U Thant

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger's girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop's baby daughter has a pain in her head that won't go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don't ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife's breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it's so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.'s thesis that pro ball-players - little as some of them may want to hear it - are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working ~ David James Duncan

You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Peoples of Egypt , you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights! ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology. ~ Murray Rothbard

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Years later Nixon aide John Ehrlichman seemed to offer up a smoking gun when he told a reporter: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. ~ Chris Hayes

Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect. ~ Christopher Hitchens

This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul. ~ Robert Kennedy

I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.' ~ Jesse Ventura

I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing. ~ Christopher Hitchens

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. ~ Plato

Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it. ~ Anne O'Hare McCormick

The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

This interplay of military and academic motives became ingrained in the Internet. "The design of both the ARPANET and the Internet favored military values, such as survivability, flexibility, and high performance, over commercial goals, such as low cost, simplicity, or consumer appeal," the technology historian Janet Abbate noted. "At the same time, the group that designed and built ARPA's networks was dominated by academic scientists, who incorporated their own values of collegiality, decentralization of authority, and open exchange of information into the system."90 These academic researchers of the late 1960s, many of whom associated with the antiwar counterculture, created a system that resisted centralized command. It would route around any damage from a nuclear attack but also around any attempt to impose control. ~ Walter Isaacson

There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive. ~ Robin Cook

That's not really a number I'm terribly interested in. ~ Colin Powell

Hauk laughed unexpectedly. "You know, Ryn, I keep thinking back to what my father used to say to me. There are two kinds of people in this world. Those like my mother who can walk into the most backwater dive hole with the worst riffraff in the universe and in ten minutes, she'll have them baking cookies and singing love songs together. Then you have those like my father. The kind of man who could walk into an antiwar monastery and in ten minutes have the monks at each other's throats." - Dancer Hauk ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own. ~ H.G.Wells

The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred. ~ Daniel Berrigan

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose
and you allow him to make war at pleasure ... If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't. ~ Abraham Lincoln

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. ~ Smedley Butler

All nations want peace, but they want a peace that suits them. ~ John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher

Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I am not blaming those who are resolved to rule, only those who show an even greater readiness to submit. ~ Thucydides

Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war. ~ Robert Higgs

At least we're getting the kind of experience we need for the next war. ~ Allen Dulles

Mother's Day really was in its origin an antiwar day, an antiwar statement. Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War, the loss of life, the carnage, and she created Mother's Day as a call for women all over the world to come together and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict. ~ Gloria Steinem

Military arrangement, and movements in consequence, like the mechanism of a clock, will be imperfectand disordered by the want of a part. ~ George Washington

War ... is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes ~ Murray Edelman

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. ~ Alexander Berkman

The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. ~ Ronald Reagan

The war ... was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides. ~ Robert E.Lee

I went into the Army believing that if you want peace you must prepare for war. I now believe that if you prepare thoroughly for war you will get it. ~ John Frederick Maurice

When American presidents prepare for foreign wars, they lie. ~ Robert Higgs

Certainly I have made comments on American society with the various pictures and have done about nine antiwar paintings. But I did them because I was incorporating my feelings into my work. ~ James Rosenquist

Working for peace in the future is to work for peace in the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. ~ John F. Kennedy

In war, as it is waged now, with the enormous losses on both sides, both sides will lose. It is a form of mutual suicide. ~ Douglas MacArthur

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

[War] can no longer be of concern to great powers alone. ~ John F. Kennedy

Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with ... ~ Gerard K. O'Neill

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. ~ Smedley Butler

I can't say I'm surprised: the grassroots antiwar movement keeps turning out to be MoveOn/A.N.S.W.E.R. astroturf. ~ Glenn Reynolds

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it. ~ Edward Abbey

World peace is not something that can be realized simply by politicians signing treaties, or by business leaders creating economic cooperation. True and lasting peace will be realized only by forging bonds of trust between people at the deepest level, in the depths of their very lives. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world. ~ Colin Powell

A rational army would run away. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion. ~ T. S. Eliot

The world should take notice when someone ... with a fanatic mind and with powerful means, receives his marching orders from Heaven. ~ Rodrigue Tremblay

Wars of aggression are the most barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments of insane tyrants who hear voices. ~ Rodrigue Tremblay

I have seen men march to the wars, and then I have watched their homeward tread, and they brought back bodies of living men, But their eyes were cold and dead. ~ Edmund Vance Cooke

This president failed so miserably in diplomacy that we are now forced to war. ~ Tom Daschle

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it. ~ Martin Luther

It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. ~ Don DeLillo

The world should be worried about those who go around the planet with a can of gasoline in one hand and a box of matches in the other, pretending to sell fire insurance. ~ Rodrigue Tremblay

Is it security you want? There is no security at the top of the world. ~ Garet Garrett

I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do. ~ Howard Zinn

The pertinent question: if Americans did not want these wars should they have been compelled to fight them? ~ Frank Chodorov

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. ~ Smedley Butler

Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace.It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him. ~ Baudouin Of Belgium

I think that NATO is itself a war criminal. ~ Harold Pinter

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace. ~ Tacitus

Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, 'War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.' ~ Immanuel Kant

Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted. ~ Thomas Jefferson

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out civilized nations. They have the best implements of war. ~ Herbert V. Prochnow

If you sacrifice liberty for security, you will lose both. ~ Ron Paul

Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants. ~ Albert Camus

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why? ~ W. H. Auden

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. ~ George W. Bush

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it ...
In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did. ~ Howard Zinn

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few. ~ William Eldridge Odom

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes. ~ Renata Adler

O peace! how many wars were waged in thy name. ~ Alexander Pope