Part I

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.[i]

War comes from our being immature, fearful, and injured and not being able to conceive of other ways of solving problems.[ii]

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‘War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.[iii]

War is the most striking instance of the failure of intelligence to master the problem of human relationships.[iv]

Emphasis on military prowess is an indication of philosophical poverty.[v]

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.[vi]

A rational army would run away.[vii]

War is the blackest villainy of which human nature is capable.[viii]

War is the greatest plague that can affect humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.[ix]

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.[x]

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.[xi]

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all![xii]

Part II

In war, truth is the first casualty.[xiii]

The great collections of individuals called nations themselves behave to some extent like individuals. The logic that governs them is an inner logic, wrought and perpetually re-wrought by passions, like that of men and women at grips with one another in an amorous or domestic quarrel of a son with his father, or of a cook with her mistress, or a wife with her husband. The party who is in the wrong believes nevertheless that he is in the right, and the party who is in the right sometimes supports his excellence cause with arguments, which appear to him to be irrefutable only because they answer to his own passionate feelings. In these quarrels of individuals, the surest way of being convinced of the excellence of the cause of one party or the other is actually to be that party: a spectator will never to the same extent give his unqualified approval…

To remain blind to the unjustness of the cause of the individual “Germany” to recognize at very moment the justness of the cause of the individual “France” the surest way was not for a German to be without judgment, or for a Frenchman to possess it, it was, both for the one and for the other, to be possessed of patriotism…the logic of passion, even it happens to be in the service of the best possible cause, is never irrefutable for the man who is not himself passionate.[xiv]

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.[xv]

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.[xvi]

The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause.[xvii]

We have come in this country to tolerate many such fixed opinions, or national pieties, each with its own baffles of invective and counterinvective, of euphemism and downright misstatement, its own screen that slides into place whenever actual discussion threatens to surface.[xviii]

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.[xix]

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?[xx]

Every man thinks god is on his side.[xxi]

Part III

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.[xxii]

As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.[xxiii]

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.[xxiv]

It seems as though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached love and forgiveness of injuries—and that men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another.[xxv]

How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.[xxvi]

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?[xxvii]

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous.”[xxviii]

There never was a good war or a bad peace.[xxix]

I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations.[xxx]

Part IV

The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.[xxxi]

What a country calls its vital interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.[xxxii]

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex Instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or protect either myself or my country. For, the outside will say, in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.[xxxiii]

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.[xxxiv]

What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.[xxxv]

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over…is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.[xxxvi]

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.[xxxvii]

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?[xxxviii]

After victory, you have more enemies.[xxxix]

Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.[xl]

All wars eventually act as boomerangs and the victor suffers as much as the vanquished.[xli]

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.[xlii]

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.[xliii]

If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.[xliv]

No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.[xlv]

I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.[xlvi]

Part V

Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.[xlvii]

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness.[xlviii]

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.[xlix]

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.[l]

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power.[li]

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.[lii]

Part VI

Make it plain that you have no time for war, that you have more important things to do….let the diplomats and marshals of the earth shoot each other.[liii]

I write. I relieve myself of one of the dubious and distinctive capacities created by the state of war in which I live — the capacity to be an enemy and an enemy only. I do my best not to shield myself from the just claims and sufferings of my enemy. Nor from the tragedy and entanglement of his own life. Nor from his errors or crimes or from the knowledge of what I myself am doing to him. Nor, finally, from the surprising similarities I find between him and me.

All of a sudden I am not condemned to this absolute, fallacious and suffocating dichotomy — this inhumane choice to “be victim or aggressor,” without having any third, more humane alternative. When I write, I can be a human being whose parts have natural and vital passages between them; a human who is able to feel close to his enemies’ sufferings and to acknowledge his just claims without relinquishing a grain of his own identity.[liv]

I hope….that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats….[lv]

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it[lvi]?

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.[lvii]

Wisdom is better than weapons of war.[lviii]

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.[lix]

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake…The work of educating the world to peace is the woman’s job, because men have a natural fear of being classed as cowards if they oppose war.[lx]

“Women will soon have political power. Woman suffrage and permanent peace will go together. When a country is in a state of mind to grant the vote to its women, it is a sign that that country is ripe for permanent peace. Women don’t feel as men do about war. They are the mothers of the race. Men think of the economic results, women think of the grief and pain.[lxi]”

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.[lxii]

I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, ‘Mother, what was war?’[lxiii]