WAR AND PACIFISM



Liberal friendly quotes:

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable loce-of-country stance, 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."
-- Albert Einstein

"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."
-- Albert Einstein

"Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting 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."
-- Mark Twain, Chronicle of Young Satan

"By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed."
-- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1902

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers is 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, What Is Man

"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

"Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them."
-- John Fowles, The Magus

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
-- George Bernard Shaw

"Older men declare war. But it is the youth who must fight and die."
-- Herbert Hoover, speech, Republican National Convention

"When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Le Diable et le bon Dieu.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth."
--Senator Hiram Johnson, attributed

"For what can war, but endless war still breed?"
-- John Milton, To Fairfax

"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 David Eisenhower

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
-- General Norman Schwartzkopf

And from the other side...

"In starting a waging a war, it is not right that matters but victory."
-- Adolf Hitler, quoted in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

"If the German people in its historic development had possessed that herd unity [defined here by Hitler as racial solidarity] which other peoples enjoyed, the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe. World history would have taken a different course, and no one can distinguish whether in this way we would not have obtained what so many blinded pacifists today hope to gain by begging, whining and whimpering: a peace, supported not by the palm branches of tearful, pacifist female mourners, but based on the victorious sword of a master people, putting the world into the service of a higher culture."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 396

"In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly all right perhaps when the highest type of man has previously conquered and subjected the world to an extent that makes him the sole ruler of this earth… Therefore, first struggle and then perhaps pacifism."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 288

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