Quotes
Quotes about War
The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.
The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.
A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.
We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward.
We have a solution for war. It is to expand the sphere of liberty.
Mystical references to "society" and its programs to "help" may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.
It is long past time that the President and this Administration show its evidence. . .Today, we are introducing a Resolution of Inquiry to compel the White House to substantiate its claims. The President led the nation to war, and spent at least $63 billion on that war, on the basis of these unfounded assertions. @ Rep. Dennis Kucinich http://www.kucinich.us.
The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.
It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.
For the sake of domestic peace, liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary it is the very means of preventing revolution and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority.
Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.Vitality springs from diversity- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces- alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.
Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone. - Last words, October 12, 1915.
I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.
For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axisâan American decision that this is sport, or that it is business. - The American Character.
I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.
The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to "help.".
So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.
Don't talk to me about atrocities in war; all war is an atrocity.
War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.
The art of the indirect approach can only be mastered, and its full scope appreciated, by study of and reflection upon the whole history of war. But we can at least crystallize the lessons into two simple maxims- one negative, the other positive. The first is that, in face of the overwhelming evidence of history, no general is justified in launching his troops to a direct attack upon an enemy firmly in position. The second, that instead of seeking to upset the enemy's equilibrium by one's attack, it must be upset before a real attack is, or can be successfully launched.
Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.
In modern war, the longest purse decides oftener than the longest sword.
