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|  Franklin P. Adams | Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop. We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It don't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it. | |
| John Adams | The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Adams | But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good
use of it. | |
| John Quincy Adams | [America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. | |
| Eli Adorno | Do you think someone who is about to rape you is going to stop and think about a condom? | |
| Aeschylus | In war, truth is the first casualty. | |
| Aesop | The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction. | |
| Henry David Aiken | From a “pragmatic” point of view, political philosophy is a monster, and whenever it has been taken seriously, the consequence, almost invariably, has been revolution, war, and eventually, the police state. | |
| Mark Alexander | Chief among the spoils of victory is the privilege of writing the history. | |
| Saul Alinksy | How to create a socialist state by Saul Alinsky:\\
There are 8 levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a socialist state. The first is the most important.\\\\
1) Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.\\
2) Poverty — Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.\\
3) Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.\\
4) Gun Control — Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.\\
5) Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).\\
6) Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children learn in school.\\
7) Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.\\
8) Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.\\ | |
| Saul Alinsky | A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises. | |
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus | The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign.... Secondly, a just cause.... Thirdly ... a rightful intention. | |
| Yassir Arafat | Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you. | |
| Hannah Arendt | Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor—coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another. | |
| Aristophanes | The wise learn many things from their enemies. | |
| Aristotle | The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless. | |
| Aristotle | Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil -- and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty. | |
| William J. Astore | 1. Our military is supposed to be a means to an end: national security. Due to its immense size and colossal budget, has our military not become an end as well as a means?
2. In World War II, Americans could explain “Why We Fight” in part because the government provided a clear and compelling rationale for war. Why are the goals of today’s wars so opaque to most Americans?
3. If our military provides us with our way of “nation building” abroad, won’t countries and peoples be more likely to copy our military ways and weaponry than our democratic teachings?
4. America is facing painful budgetary belt tightening. Why is the military immune?
5. Why does “support our troops” seemingly end when they leave the service, leading us to tolerate such inequities as an unemployment rate of 21% for young veterans? | |
| William J. Astore | When it comes to our nation's military affairs, ignorance is not bliss. What's remarkable then, given the permanent state of war in which we find ourselves, is how many Americans seem content not to know. | |
| Saint Augustine | An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.” | |
| Bill Ayers | The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war. | |
| Michael Badnarik | Allow me to dispel a myth. People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle. The US government overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran and replaced him with the Shah. The US government gave weapons, intelligence and money to Saddam Hussein. The US government also helped Libyan Col. Qaddafi come to power, propped up the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian regime, and gave assistance to Osama bin Laden. Most Americans have forgotten these events. But the people of the Middle East will always remember. It was because of American troops in Saudi Arabia, lethal sanctions on Iraq, support for states in serious violation of International Law, and siding with Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians that terrorist leaders were able to recruit those individuals who caused 3,000 Americans to pay the ultimate price on September 11, 2001. | |
| Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac | The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants. | |
| William Barr | In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides. | |
| Bruce Barton | What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | A Fatal Tendency of Mankind. Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful. | |
| Daniel Berrigan | I don't know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits childred to be destroyed. | |
| Albert J. Beveridge | Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest. | |
| Randolph Bourne | War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society these irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. | |
| Randolph Bourne | War is the health of the State. | |
| General Omar Bradley | We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees. | |
| Bertolt Brecht | Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? Why then, the war would come to you! | |
| Harry Bridges | No man has ever been born a Negro hater, a Jew hater, or any other kind of hater. Nature refuses to be involved in such suicidal practices. | |
| John Bright | Force is not a remedy. | |
| Harry Browne | If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within 5 years men would be having abortions! | |
| Edward Bulwer-Lytton | The pen is mightier than the sword. | |
| Edmund Burke | All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | [The war in Iraq is] a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times...a new world order can emerge. | |
| George W. Bush | Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty. | |
| George W. Bush | We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans,
and confront the worst threats before they emerge. | |
| George W. Bush | We have every reason to assume the worst. | |
| George W. Bush | Today the Justice Department did issue a blanket alert. It was in recognition of a general threat we received. This is not the first time the Justice Department have acted like this. I hope it is the last. But given the attitude of the evildoers, it may not be. | |
| George W. Bush | The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. | |
| George W. Bush | I don’t give a goddamn. I’m the President
and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way. ...
Stop throwing the Constitution in my face.
It’s just a goddamned piece of paper! | |
| George W. Bush | We will fight with full force and might of the United States military. | |
| George W. Bush | Saddam Hussein's regime is a gray and gathering danger. | |
| George W. Bush | The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance
in the campaign against terror.
We've removed an ally of al Qaeda. | |
| George W. Bush | There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland. | |
| George W. Bush | The choice is his [Saddam Hussein's], and if he does not disarm, the United States of America will lead a coalition and disarm him in the name of Peace. | |
| George W. Bush | I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office and foreign policy matters with war on my mind. | |
| George W. Bush | And our security will require all Americans
to be forward-looking and resolute,
to be ready for pre-emptive action. | |
| George W. Bush | There will be no going back to the era before September 11th, 2001, to false comfort in a dangerous world. | |
| George W. Bush | There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there [in Iraq]. My answer is, 'Bring 'em on.' | |
| George W. Bush | We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th. | |
| George W. Bush | Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. | |
| George W. Bush | Our enemies are a radical network of terrorists --
and every government that supports them. | |
| George W. Bush | We're too great a nation to allow the evildoers to affect our soul. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | My mental faculties remained in suspended animation
while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups.
This is typical with everyone in the military. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. | |
| Lord Byron | He makes a solitude, and calls it - peace. | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | When the swords flash let no idea of love, piety, or even the face of your fathers move you. | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | 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. | |
| Jimmy Carter | The decision to attack the entire nation [of Yugoslavia] has been counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian life has now become senseless and excessively brutal. ... The United States' insistence on the use of cluster bombs, designed to kill or maim humans, is condemned almost universally and brings discredit on our nation (as does our refusal to support a ban on land mines). Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny. | |
| Dick Cheney | It will be necessary for us to be a nation of men, and not laws. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought. | |
| Chicago Evening American | The Rothschilds can start or prevent wars. Their word could make or break empires. | |
| Shirley Chisholm | It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory -- victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | I like a man who grins when he fights. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.' | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.' | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. | |
| Winston Churchill | This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Endless money forms the sinews of war. | |
| Quintus Tullius Cicero | During war, the laws are silent. | |
| J. Reuben Clark, Jr. | ...there is no provision in the Charter itself that contemplates ending war. It is true the Charter provides for force to bring peace, but such use of force is itself war... The Charter is a war document not a peace document... Not only does the Charter Organization not prevent future wars, but it makes it practically certain that we shall have future wars, and as to such wars it takes from us the power to declare them, to choose the side on which we shall fight, to determine what forces and military equipment we shall use in the war, and to control and command our sons who do the fighting. | |
| Claudius | He who wants peace must prepare for war. | |
| Georges Clemenceau | War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men. | |
| Bill Clinton | A lot of wonderful people love their country and hate the military. | |
| Bill Clinton | The Bush administration continues to coddle China, despite its continuing crackdown on democratic reform, its brutal subjugation of Tibet, its irresponsible export of nuclear and missile technology... Such forbearance on our part might have made sense during the Cold War when China was the counterweight to Soviet power. It makes no sense to play the China card now when our opponents have thrown in their hand. | |
| Thomas M. Coffey | Prohibition ended in 1933 because the nation’s most influential people, as well as the general public, acknowledged that it had failed. It had increased lawlessness and drinking and aggravated alcohol abuse. | |
| William Colby | The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government. | |
| Communist Rules for Revolution | Communist Rules for Revolution... | |
| Constitution of UNESCO | Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. | |
| U.S. Constitution | No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. | |
| Council on Foreign Relations | [A] possible further difficulty is cited, namely, that arising from the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war. This argument is countered with the contention that a treaty will override this barrier, let alone the fact that our participation in such police action as might be recommended by the international security organization need not necessarily be construed as war. | |
| Honoré de Balzac | There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events. | |
| Alphonse de Lamartine | Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism. | |
| Salvador de Madariaga | No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies. | |
| Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre | The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. | |
| Vittorio de Sica | Moral indignation is in most cases 2% moral, 48% indignation and 50% envy. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. | |
| Eugene Debs | 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. | |
| Declaration of Independence | The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.— Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world... | |
| Demosthenes | Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well. | |
| John Dryden | War is the trade of Kings. | |
| Dieter Duhm | There can be no peace on earth as long as there is war in love. | |
| John J. Dunphy | If the previous paragraphs [of 'A Religion For A New Age'] prove
anything, it is that the Bible is not merely another book, an outmoded and
archaic book, or even an extremely influential book; it has been and remains
an incredibly dangerous book. It and the various Christian churches which
are parasitic upon it have been directly responsible for most of the wars,
persecutions and outrages which humankind has perpetrated upon itself over
the past two thousand years. | |
| Abba Eban | History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. | |
| John Ehrlichman | You want to know what this was really all about? 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. | |
| Albert Einstein | I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. ... A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. ... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. | |
| T. S. Eliot | The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end. | |
| Rahm Emanuel | You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. | |
| Desiderius Erasmus | War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it. | |
| Edward Everett | Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred. | |
| Edward Everett | Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred. | |
| William Norman Ewer | I gave my life for freedom--This I know;
For those who bade me fight had told me so. | |
| John A. Fisher | The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | ... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | There was never a good war, or a bad peace. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | ... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | ... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Finally, there seem to be but three Ways for a Nation to acquire Wealth. The first is by War as the Romans did in plundering their conquered Neighbours. This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way; wherein Man receives a real Increase of the Seed thrown into the Ground, in a kind of continual Miracle wrought by the Hand of God in his favour, as a Reward for his innocent Life, and virtuous Industry. | |
| Sigmund Freud | It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. | |
| Milton Friedman | If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true. | |
| Milton Friedman | I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal. | |
| Milton Friedman | [Drug use] does harm a great many other people, but primarily because it's prohibited. There are an enormous number of innocent victims now. You've got the people whose purses are stolen, who are bashed over the head by people trying to get enough money for their next fix. You've got the people killed in the random drug wars. You've got the corruption of the legal establishment. You've got the innocent victims who are taxpayers who have to pay for more and more prisons, and more and more prisoners, and more and more police. You've got the rest of us who don't get decent law enforcement because all the law enforcement officials are busy trying to do the impossible.
And, last, but not least, you've got the people of Colombia and Peru and so on. What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against drugs, there would be no market for these drugs. | |
| Marshall Fritz | In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on. | |
| Erich Fromm | If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it. | |
| Major General J.F.C. Fuller | [S]ince the substitution of an industrial for the agricultural order of society and the conquest of the industrial by the financial, the government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semioccult power which, automatically, rather than calculatedly, pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron [of World War I]. | |
| Rick Gaber | The Nazis are well remembered for murdering well over 11 million people in the implementation of their slogan, 'The public good before the private good,' the Chinese Communists for murdering 62 million people in the implementation of theirs, 'Serve the people,' and the Soviet Communists for murdering more than 60 million people in the implementation of Karl Marx's slogan, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' Anyone who defends any of these, or any variation of them, on the grounds of their 'good intentions' is an immoral (NOT 'amoral') enabler of the ACTUAL (not just the proverbial) road to hell. | |
| Indira Gandhi | You can't shake hands with a clenched fist. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | If we are to reach real peace in this world,
and if we are to carry on a real war against war,
we shall have to begin with the children. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | 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? | |
| Daryl Gates | We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason. | |
| W. L. George | Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies. | |
| Richard Gephardt | We can see beyond the present shadow of war in the Middle East to a new world order where the strong work together to deter and stop aggression. This was precisely Franklin Roosevelt's and Winston Churchill's vision for peace in the post-war period. | |
| Georgie Anne Geyer | An idea is growing in foreign policy circles in Washington … that there is no turning back. We are stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan for 25 to 40 years, we are embedded in our prideful unilateralism, and nothing can return us to more traditional American values and principles of action. The hubristic creators of this “inevitability” planned it this way. … Their failures in Iraq have not stopped the fanatic, power-hungry neoconservatives. … The hard-liners who dominate this administration … have led us to eternal conflict with Muslims. | |
| Nikki Giovanni | In the name of peace They waged the wars Ain't they got no shame | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times. | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information. | |
| Hermann Goering | I joined the party because I was a revolutionary, not because of any ideological nonsense. | |
| Hermann Goering | Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the 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 tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. | |
| Hermann Goering | Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat. | |
| Justice Arthur Goldberg | It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct
war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the
constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity
for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the
gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional
history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that
there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental
constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit
governmental action. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on. | |
| G. Edward Griffin | To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism. | |
| Nathan Hale | I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | [W]ar is a question, under our constitution, not of Executive, but of Legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say whether the Nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of War. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude,
that the fiery and destructive passions of war, reign in the human breast,
with much more powerful sway, than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace;
and, that to model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquility,
is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government
which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself? | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies -- all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others. ... The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. | |
| Suheir Hammad | Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician.
Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there.
Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16.
A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death.
A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you.
Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.
And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine. | |
| Hannibal | We will either find a way or make one. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance. | |
| Harvard University Press | As the death toll mounts -- as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on -- the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century. | |
| John Hay | The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| John Hayward | If you really want to compete with Russia and China to prevent the 21st Century from being dominated by a new axis of evil, you must first defeat the Church of Global Warming. As long as that’s the official state religion of the Western world, we haven’t got a prayer. | |
| Heinrich Heine | Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. | |
| Patrick Henry | It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! | |
| Frank Herbert | The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. | |
| Robert Higgs | Democrats and Republicans alike support the "War on Drugs." Federal, state, and local police make more than a million drug arrests
yearly. Drug cases clog the courts. More than 60% of federal prison cells and about 30% of state prison cells hold drug offenders. No-knock drug
raiders nullify the Fourth Amendment every day. Yet illicit drugs continue to pour onto the market, and they are readily available throughout the
land. Looks like another failed policy. But politicians say more money will win the war. For fiscal 1996, President Clinton has requested a record
$14.6 billion for this exercise in futility. State and local government will also spend huge sums. Who benefits? Posturing politicians and puritanical
zealots, of course, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, Coast Guard, FBI, and the rest of the drug warriors. Police love
the drug war, because the forfeiture laws it inspired allow them to seize and keep private property with impunity. Corrupt cops get fabulous bribes,
and corruption therefore runs rampant. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death. | |
| Adolf Hitler | The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies. | |
| Adolf Hitler | The party ... must not become a servant of the masses, but their master. ... The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual. | |
| Adolf Hitler | In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. | |
| Adolf Hitler | All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it... Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. | |
| Gen. Joseph P. Hoar | In their great wisdom, our Founding Fathers, gathered in Philadelphia to draft the new U.S. Constitution, gave the sole authority to declare war to the U.S. Congress. ... our Founders understood that it was essential, to secure a representative form of republican self-government, that the power to declare war must be in the hands of Congress, and not in the Executive Branch. ...
Nothing has transpired in the intervening centuries to justify any alteration in their wise decision. Under our Federal Constitution, only the Congress has the power to declare war, and that must remain a cardinal principle. In recent decades, we have seen an erosion of that Constitutional principle, and I fully concur that this erosion must be halted and reverse. | |
| Abbie Hoffman | The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. | |
| Homer | To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight. | |
| Sidney Hook | If one shoots at a king, one must not miss. | |
| Horace | And when all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy is Warre; which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | Every single American can exclaim, 'Nothing justifies what they did in New York and Washington,' not even the bombs that our government has dropped on them for ten years or the embargo that has caused the deaths of so many children. That's of course true…The issue is simply an acceptance of reality and a fundamental fact of life: When governments do bad things to people, people sometimes retaliate. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | [T]ake the war on drugs. The average American says, “The war on drugs has been beneficial.” The rest of us see reality. This war has destroyed thousands of Americans. It is also a pretext for government agents to rob innocent people in airports and on the highways -- they seize and confiscate large amounts of cash and say to their victims: “Sue us if you don’t like it.” And more and more judges, politicians, intelligence agents, and law-enforcement officers are on the take -- as dependent on the drug-war largess as the drug lords themselves. | |
| John Howard | Nobody should claim that the war [in Iraq] is over. But certainly it can be said that the regime is finished. | |
| Tokugawa Ieyasu | To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend, and once you become his friend, all his defences come down. Then you can choose the most fitting method for his demise. | |
| William Ralph Inge | A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent -- as permanent as the war debts. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | [T]he arguments that have been addressed to us lead me to utter more explicit misgivings about war powers than the Court has done. The Government asserts no constitutional basis for this legislation other than this vague, undefined and undefinable 'war power.' No one will question that this power is the most dangerous one to free government in the whole catalogue of powers. It is usually invoked in haste and excitement, when calm legislative consideration of constitutional limitation is difficult. It is executed in a time of patriotic fervor that makes moderation unpopular. And, worst of all, it is interpreted by judges under the influence of the same passions and pressures. Always, as in this case, the Government urges hasty decision to forestall some emergency or serve some purpose and pleads that paralysis will result if its claims to power are denied or their confirmation delayed. | |
| Thomas J. Jackson | The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth. | |
| Helmuth James | A war, even the most successfull one, is a national misfortune. | |
| Helmuth James | Since National Socialism came to power, I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me -- and in the end, that is a man's duty. | |
| Helmuth James | Today, not a numerous, but an active part of the German people are beginning to realize, not that they have been led astray, not that bad times await them, not that the war may end in defeat, but that what is happening is sin and that they are personally responsible for each terrible deed that has been committed -- naturally, not in the earthly sense, but as Christians. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions?
Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the
suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that
suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties
might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was
shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases
wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that
operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost
prepared to live under its constant suspension. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [The] Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile? | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Convinced that the republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind, my prayers & efforts shall be cordially distributed to the support of that we have so happily established. It is indeed an animating thought that, while we are securing the rights of ourselves & our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also. Heaven help their struggles, and lead them, as it has done us, triumphantly thro' them. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Put up again thy sword into its place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword. | |
| Hiram Johnson | The first casualty when war comes is Truth. | |
| Hiram W. Johnson | The first casualty when war comes is truth. | |
| Immanuel Kant | The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away. | |
| Immanuel Kant | War itself requires no special motive but appears to be engrafted on human nature; it passes even for something noble, to which the love of glory impels men quite apart from any selfish urges. Thus among the American savages, just as much as among those of Europe during the age of chivalry, military valor is held to be of great worth in itself, not only during war (which is natural) but in order that there should be war. 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 inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away." So much for the measures nature takes to lead the human race, considered as a class of animals, to her own end. | |
| Helen Keller | No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man
of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed. | |
| Kathy Kelly | The US government devotes massive resources and much sophistication to killing in Afghanistan. Would that it would spend a little to realize that its policies are creating anger. . . . It costs about $1 million a year for a US soldier -- boots on the ground -- in Afghanistan. Imagine what good that money could do if spent to help the Afghan people. A governor in Afghanistan makes about $1,000 a year. | |
| Walt Kelly | We have met the enemy and he is us. | |
| Sally Kempton | It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. | |
| George F. Kennan | Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. | |
| John F. Kennedy | I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics but for our contributions to the human spirit. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. | |
| Genghis Khan | A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed, to see those whom they cherished in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept,… I strongly disagreed with Communism’s ethical relativism... there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently, almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. | |
| William Lyon Mackenzie King | We must also go out and meet the enemy before he reaches our shores.
We must defeat him before he attacks us, before our cities are laid to waste. | |
| Jeane J. Kirkpatrick | We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. | |
| Charles Koch | Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. | |
| David B. Kopel | [T]he drug prohibition laws have led to wholesale destruction of civil liberties. The War on Drugs has now become a War on the Constitution, and the American people have become, in the eyes of their government, a society of suspects. | |
| David B. Kopel | In the twentieth century, the United States government forced 100,000 United States citizens into concentration camps. In 1941, American citizens of Japanese descent were herded into concentration camps run by the United States government. Like the victims of other mass deportations, these Americans were allowed to retain only the property they could carry with them. Everything else—including family businesses built up over generations—had to be sold immediately at fire-sale prices or abandoned. The camps were “ringed with barbed wire fences and guard towers.” During the war, the federal government pushed Central and South American governments to round up persons of Japanese ancestry in those nations and have them shipped to the U.S. concentration camps. ... the incarceration of Japanese-Americans continued long after any plausible national security justification had vanished. ... what if the war had gone differently? What if a frustrated, angry America, continuing to lose a war in the Pacific, had been tempted to take revenge on the “enemy” that was, in the concentration camps, a safe target. Would killing all the Japanese be a potential policy option? In 1944, by which time America’s eventual victory in the war seemed assured, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, “What do you think we should do with Japan, as a country, after the war?” Thirteen percent of Americans chose the response “Kill all Japanese people.” | |
| Ted Koppel | A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure regime change even before he took power in January 2001… It has been called a secret blueprint for US global domination. … A small group of people with a plan to remove Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush was elected president. … And 9/11 provided the opportunity to set it in motion. Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed years ahead of the blow. | |
| Louis Lamour | Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom. | |
| Rose Wilder Lane | Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political
structure, of these United States protects any American from
arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the
Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the
torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a
cellar. | |
| William Langer | Having so pledged myself, and having been elected to my senatorship upon such pledge, and not having been elected to create an organization to which we would give a promise, either express or implied, that it would have the authority to send our boys all over the Earth, I cannot support the Charter. I believe it is fraught with danger to the American people and to American institutions. | |
| Admiral Gene LaRocque | I hate it when they say, “He gave his life for his country.” Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them. | |
| Latin Proverb | History is written by the victor. | |
| Andrew B. Law | There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom. | |
| Robert E. Lee | Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory,
there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me.
Had I foreseen these results of subjugation,
I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men,
my sword in my right hand. | |
| Robert E. Lee | [W]e made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers. | |
| Robert E. Lee | With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword... | |
| Robert E. Lee | It is well that war is so terrible -- we should grow too fond of it. | |
| Robert W. Lee | It is becoming increasingly apparent that many—arguably most—of the problems that plague our nation have been aggravated rather than alleviated by federal intervention. In one area after another, massive infusions of tax dollars have been squandered on false solutions which, when they fail to achieve their stated objectives, are cited to justify even more spending on other futile schemes that result in bigger government. Examples include programs and laws supposedly intended to reduce racial animosity which have instead heightened race-related tensions; welfare schemes that, rather than reducing poverty, have enticed millions of Americans to become dependent on Washington for their daily bread; federal funding (and control) of education, which has spawned a monumental education crisis; a “war” on drugs which has done little to curb drug traffic, but which has eroded many personal liberties; a health-care finance system that has deteriorated as government meddling and regulation have increased; and a masochistic immigration policy larded with false "solutions" that, while failing to stop the inflow of illegal aliens, have paved the way for further government intrusion into the lives of nearly all Americans. | |
| John Lehman | Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | They will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them. | |
| C. S. Lewis | We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.\\
\\
As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.\\
\\
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way. | |
| C. S. Lewis | War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | 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. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | The Shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shephard as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Military glory -- the attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood. | |
| John Locke | [W]henever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty. | |
| John Locke | Whosoever uses force without Right ... puts himself into a state of War with those, against whom he uses it, and in that state all former Ties are canceled, all other Rights cease, and every one has a Right to defend himself, and to resist the Aggressor. | |
| John Locke | ... whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence. ... [Power then] devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and, by the Establishment of a new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society. | |
| John Locke | [W]henever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence. Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty ... | |
| Los Angeles Times | Because law enforcement resources have been concentrated on the street drug trade in minority communities, drug arrests of minorities increased at 10 times the rate of increase for whites. | |
| Lucanus | All go free when multitudes offend.
[Lat., Quicquid multis peccatur inultum est.] | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Wars are caused by undefended wealth. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Old soldiers never die; they just fade away. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | In war there is no substitute for victory. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - 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 by furnishing the
exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy
taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals,
disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations,
inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the
exertions of private citizens have been able to create it. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | Among other causes of misfortune which your not being armed brings upon you, it makes you despised.... | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country? | |
| James Madison | Of all the enemies to 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...known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… 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 | Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. | |
| James Madison | A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. | |
| James Madison | The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace. | |
| James Madison | ... large and permanent military establishments ... are forbidden by the principles of free government, and against the necessity of which the militia were meant to be a constitutional bulwark. | |
| James Madison | What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2nd it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3rd it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable. | |
| James Madison | [T]he power to declare war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature. | |
| James Madison | It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute. | |
| James Madison | War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. | |
| James Madison | The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature. | |
| James Madison | The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. | |
| Brian Maher | Only a debt-backed system of paper money could finance the great wars, the social improvements and the fevered dreams of the 20th century. | |
| Nelson Mandela | A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire. | |
| Chris Matthews | The issue of this campaign -- it IS that word socialism. Some people like it. Younger people like it. Those of us like me, who grew up in a cold war and saw some aspects of it while visiting places like Vietnam, like I have, and seeing countries like Cuba, being there. I’m seeing what socialism’s like. I don’t like it. OK? It’s not only not free. It doesn’t freakin’ work! | |
| George McGovern | I would support a Presidential candidate who pledged to take the following steps: ... At the end of the war in the Persian Gulf, press for ... a 'new world order' based not upon Pax Americana but on peace through law with a stronger U.N. and World Court. | |
| Melians | It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves? | |
| Menander | Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease. | |
| H. L. Mencken | To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. | |
| H. L. Mencken | [T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. | |
| Howard Metzenbaum | What good does it do to ban some guns. All guns should be banned. | |
| John Stuart Mill | War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. | |
| John Stuart Mill | But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other. | |
| Sir Denison Miller | This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished. | |
| Joel Miller | What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves. | |
| Joel Miller | Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs,
our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy --
comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings
are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties. | |
| Sarah Gertrude Millin | The government of the world was [Cecil] Rhodes' simple desire. | |
| John Milton | The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose. | |
| John Milton | For what can war but endless war still breed? | |
| Edward R. Murrow | We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism -- born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into the position where they have to make the great decision -- the alternative of life or death... | |
| A. J. Muste | There is no way to peace; peace is the way. | |
| National Press Club | In Defense Of Freedom ... (more) | |
| Huey P. Newton | The imperialistic or capitalistic system occupies areas.
It occupies Vietnam now. They occupy them by sending soldiers there, by sending policeman there.
The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand.
They make the racist secure in his racism.
The gun in the establishment's hand makes the establishment secure in its exploitation. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out. | |
| Richard M. Nixon | The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature. [If a president is successful in bypassing the Congress] it is evident that the people are cheated out of the best ingredients in the government, the safeguards of peace which is the greatest of their blessings. | |
| Charles Eliot Norton | There never was a good war," said Franklin. There have indeed been many wars in which a good man must take part, and take part with grave gladness to die if need be, a willing sacrifice, thankful to give life for what is dearer than life, and happy that even by death in war he is serving the cause of peace. But if a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime. | |
| Charles Eliot Norton | The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense. | |
| George Orwell | The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. | |
| Thomas Paine | All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. | |
| Thomas Paine | Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world? | |
| Thomas Paine | The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. | |
| Thomas Paine | The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood. | |
| Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit | The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war. | |
| Blaise Pascal | Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. | |
| Isabel Paterson | Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. | |
| Kort E. Patterson | According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them. | |
| General George S. Patton, Jr. | It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. | |
| General George S. Patton, Jr. | It is certain that the two World Wars in which I have participated would not have occurred had we been prepared. It is my belief that adequate preparation on our part would have prevented or materially shortened all our other wars beginning with that of 1812. Yet, after each of our wars, there has always been a great hue and cry to the effect that there will be no more wars, that disarmament is the sure road to health, happiness, and peace; and that by removing the fire department, we will remove fires. These ideas spring from wishful thinking and from the erroneous belief that wars result from logical processes. There is no logic in wars. They are produced by madmen. No man can say when future madmen will reappear. I do not say that there will be no more wars; I devoutly hope that there will not, but I do say that the chances of avoiding future wars will be greatly enhanced if we are ready. | |
| General George S. Patton, Jr. | No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | We have a lot of goodness in this country. And we should promote it, but never through the barrel of a gun. We should do it by setting good standards, motivating people and have them want to emulate us. But you can't enforce our goodness, like the neocons preach, with an armed force. It doesn't work. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions... Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | When one person can initiate war, by its definition, a republic no longer exists. | |
| Peace March Signs | [Transcription of some of the signs in Washington during the peace march January 18, 2003] | |
| Wendell Phillips | A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? ... I maintain on the principles of '76 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. ... You can never make such a war popular. ... The North never will endorse such a war. | |
| Pablo Picasso | Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy. | |
| William Pitt | Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. | |
| Plato | A tyrant…is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. | |
| Plato | The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector. | |
| Plato | Only the dead have seen the end of war. | |
| Plato | 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. | |
| Bruce D. Porter | Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance. | |
| Ezra Pound | Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt. | |
| General Colin Powell | Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return. | |
| General Colin Powell | So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear.
And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace. | |
| General Colin Powell | One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when somebody needs a cop. | |
| Ayn Rand | It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. | |
| Ayn Rand | Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force? | |
| John Randolph | The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it. | |
| Jeannette Rankin | You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. | |
| Jon Rappoport | War, what is it good for? With the same "socialist" elites backing both sides, it's good for business. It's good for creating chaos and destruction. It's good for launching new global organizations, in the aftermath; organizations that exert a level of control and reach that didn't exist before. It's good for launching organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and the World Trade Organization---dedicated to Globalism, which in turn is dedicated to planned civilization, in which the individual is demeaned and the group is All. Freedom is demeaned; and dominance by the few over the many is hailed as peace in our time. | |
| Jon Rappoport | Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Common sense told us that to preserve the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons...but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease. | |
| Ronald Reagan | There are some who've forgotten why we have a military. It's not to promote war; it's to be prepared for peace. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! | |
| Ronald Reagan | History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. | |
| Charley Reese | If you look at Washington, you see permanently camped on the banks of the Potomac spread around in concentric circles an army representing thousands of selfish interests. The sole purpose of their presence is to plunder, by hook or crook, the public treasury for the benefit of their particular people or corporations. | |
| Robert Reich | The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. | |
| Sheldon Richman | Apologists for activist government never tire of telling us that the benevolent state is our protector and that without it we'd be at the mercy of monsters. It is about time that we understood that the U.S. government does more to endanger the American people than any imagined monsters around the world…by pursuing its Grand Foreign Policy of meddling anywhere and everywhere. | |
| Sheldon Richman | Some conservatives are surprised to find people on the Left supporting the war in Afghanistan. It's not surprising at all…It is hard for the government to prosecute a war and not expand…Conservatives may think they can support war and oppose the expansion of the state, but that is like trying to square the circle. What makes them think they can contain the expansion? | |
| Michael Rivero | The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people’s lives for personal gains. | |
| Will Rogers | America has a very unique record. We never lost a war or won a conference... | |
| Will Rogers | We are the only nation in the world that waits till we get into a war before we start getting ready for it. | |
| Will Rogers | Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it. | |
| Will Rogers | You can have all the advanced war methods you want, but, after all, nobody has ever invented a war that you don't have to have somebody in the guise of soldiers to stop the bullets. | |
| Ernst Rohm | Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | 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. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | In strict confidence … I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war. | |
| Edward Alsworth Ross | During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power... | |
| Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild | Either the application for renewal of the charter (for the First Bank of the United States) is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war. | |
| Donald Rumsfeld | What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before. | |
| Bertrand Russell | These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion. | |
| Dr. Mary J. Ruwart | Forcing people to be more 'unselfish' creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse
than the disease. ... In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and
the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a quiet
pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not
what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and
short-sightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means by which war and poverty are propagated.
In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern! | |
| Saladin | European merchants supply the best weaponry, contributing to their own defeat. | |
| George Santayana | When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and reestablish themselves alone. | |
| Eric Schaub | Some mistakes cannot be redeemed but by forgiveness. | |
| Ken Schoolland | For thousands of years, the tireless effort of productive men and women has been spent trying to reduce the distance between communities of the world by reducing the costs of commerce and trade. Over the same span of history, the slothful and incompetent protectionist has endlessly sought to erect barriers in order to prohibit competition—thus, effectively moving communities farther apart. When trade is cut off entirely, the real producers may as well be on different planets. The protectionist represents the worst in humanity: fear of change, fear of challenge, and the jealous envy of genius. The protectionist is not against the use of every kind of force, even warfare, to crush his rival. If mankind is to survive, then these primeval fears must be defeated. | |
| Joseph A. Schumpeter | The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is unapproved of not only intellectually but also morally. | |
| General H. Norman Schwarzkopf | Character is the single most important ingredient of leadership. Proper leadership would have prevented the wars in Kosovo and Somalia. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Worse than war is the very fear of war. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Arms observe no bounds; nor can the wrath of the sword, once drawn, be easily checked or stayed; war delights in blood. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples? There are no limits to our greed, none to our cruelty. And as long as such crimes are committed by stealth and by individuals, they are less harmful and less portentous; but cruelties are practised in accordance with acts of senate and popular assembly, and the public is bidden to do that which is forbidden to the individual. Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret, are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out. Man, naturally the gentlest class of being, is not ashamed to revel in the blood of others, to wage war, and to entrust the waging of war to his sons, when even dumb beasts and wild beasts keep the peace with one another. Against this overmastering and widespread madness philosophy has become a matter of greater effort, and has taken on strength in proportion to the strength which is gained by the opposition forces. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Just as an enemy is more dangerous to a retreating army, so every trouble that fortune brings attacks us all the harder if we yield and turn our backs. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | And yet life, Lucilius, is really a battle. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Why does God afflict the best of men with ill-health, or sorrow, or other troubles? Because in the army the most hazardous services are assigned to the bravest soldiers: a general sends his choicest troops to attack the enemy in a midnight ambuscade, to reconnoitre his line of march, or to drive the hostile garrisons from their strong places. No one of these men says as he begins his march, "The general has dealt hardly with me," but "He has judged well of me." | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us. | |
| John Shattuck | In the twentieth century the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is four times the number killed in all this century’s wars combined. | |
| Roger Sherman | The Executive should be able to repel and not to commence war. | |
| Roger Sherman | The Executive should be able to repel and not to commence war. | |
| William Tecumseh Sherman | War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. | |
| William Tecumseh Sherman | I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. 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. | |
| William Tecumseh Sherman | There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them. | |
| William Tecumseh Sherman | I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected. | |
| Edward A. Shils | The obsessive fear of secrets culminates in the denial of the right of private difference, which is the denial of the right of others to possess a sphere of privacy. | |
| Edward A. Shils | The peculiar idea of moral infection in the consequence of association with individuals of indelible wickedness leads to the notion of “guilt by association.” | |
| Edward A. Shils | A free society can exist only when public spirit is balanced by an equal inclination of men to mind their own business. | |
| General David M. Shoup | I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans. | |
| Jan C. Smuts | Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings. | |
| Tony Snow | The last person to achieve unambiguous victory in an air war was Zeus. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. | |
| Thomas Sowell | The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others. | |
| Herbert Spencer | Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. | |
| Lysander Spooner | The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that -- however bloody -- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave. | |
| Lysander Spooner | In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot -- which is a mere substitute for a bullet -- because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him. | |
| Lysander Spooner | A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result -- and a natural one -- has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent. | |
| Lysander Spooner | In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot -- which is a mere substitute for a bullet -- because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him. | |
| Josef Stalin | One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic. | |
| Harold E. Stassen | Government is like fire. If it is kept within bounds and under the control of the people, it contributes to the welfare of all. But if it gets out of place, if it gets too big and out of control, it destroys the happiness and even the lives of the people. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is the landmark of an authoritarian regime... | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve it’s high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for understanding. | |
| General Joseph W. Stilwell | Illegitimati non carborundum. (Don't let the bastards grind you down.) | |
| Henry Stimson | When the news first came that Japan had attacked us my first feeling was of relief that … a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed. | |
| John Stockwell | Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. | |
| Joseph Story | Another not unimportant consideration is, that the powers of the general government will be, and indeed must be, principally employed upon external objects, such as war, peace, negotiations with foreign powers, and foreign commerce. In its internal operations it can touch but few objects, except to introduce regulations beneficial to the commerce, intercourse, and other relations, between the states, and to lay taxes for the common good. The powers of the states, on the other hand, extend to all objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, and liberties, and property of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state. | |
| William Graham Sumner | The great foe of democracy now and in the near future is plutocracy. Every year that passes brings out this antagonism more distinctly. It is to be the social war of the twentieth century. In that war militarism, expansion and imperialism will all favor plutocracy. In the first place, war and expansion will favor jobbery, both in the dependencies and at home. In the second place, they will take away the attention of the people from what the plutocrats are doing. In the third place, they will cause large expenditures of the people’s money, the return for which will not go into the treasury, but into the hands of a few schemers. In the fourth place, they will call for a large public debt and taxes, and these things especially tend to make men unequal, because any social burdens bear more heavily on the weak than on the strong, and so make the weak weaker and the strong stronger. Therefore expansion and imperialism are a grand onslaught on democracy. | |
| Thomas Szasz | The battle for the world is the battle for definitions. | |
| Cornelius Tacitus | So, as you go into battle, remember your ancestors and remember your descendants. | |
| A. J. P. Taylor | Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history. | |
| A. J. P. Taylor | No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic. | |
| The Annals of Tacitus | Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past. | |
| The Holy Bible | For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. | |
| The Holy Bible | Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbour: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth. | |
| Thucydides | Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | You may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience. | |
| John Trenchard | It's the misfortune of all Countries, that they sometimes lie
under a unhappy necessity to defend themselves by Arms against the
ambition of their Governors, and to fight for what's their own.
If those in government are heedless of reason, the people must
patiently submit to Bondage, or stand upon their own Defence; which
if they are enabled to do, they shall never be put upon it, but
their Swords may grow rusty in their hands; for that Nation is
surest to live in Peace, that is most capable of making War; and a
Man that hath a Sword by his side, shall have least occasion to
make use of it. | |
| Mao Tse-Tung | Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. | |
| Bishop Desmond Tutu | Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility. | |
| Mark Twain | How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better. | |
| Mark Twain | When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!<p>
'O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.'<p>
[After a pause.] Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits. | |
| Mark Twain | Next 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. | |
| Sun Tzu | 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 | Those who excel in war first cultivate their own humanity and justice and maintain their laws and institutions. By these means they make their governments invincible. | |
| Sun Tzu | If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. | |
| Sun Tzu | All warfare is based on deception. There is no place where espionage is not used. Offer the enemy bait to lure him. | |
| Unknown | War is the tool through which the remaining Constitutional restraints on government and rights of the people will be destroyed. War will be the
gateway through which total statism in any of its forms (fascism, socialism, communism) will be imposed upon the United States. They will rally the
people’s patriotism, and give the laws Orwellian sounding names like the “Patriot Acts”, and “Freedom Laws” and cries of “America First,” but these
acts will be anti-patriotic, anti-freedom, and anti-American. At the core of all these activities will be one purpose -- to impose ever increasing control
over the citizens, marching toward total statism. They will suspend due process and Constitutional restrictions proclaiming “extraordinary times”
require extraordinary measures. At first they will only be used against a few select atrocious and most heinous individuals with unfamiliar
appearance, customs and beliefs. Initially, it will simply be a matter of degree, but the precedent is now set. Extraordinary measures solely for
extraordinary individuals, but slowly and then more rapidly the extraordinary will become the ordinary until such measures can apply to anyone.
They will deride anyone who opposes these Orwellian acts as dangerously naïve, as pacifists, as isolationists, as unpatriotic, as sympathizing with
“the enemy” whoever “the enemy” may be at the time, and as un-American. They will make war with vague, ever changing goals and objectives.
They will make war on elusive, obscure enemies by proclaiming wars against “subversives” or “guerillas” or “militias” or “revolutionaries” or
“aggressors” or “terrorists” or whatever ambiguous name they can imagine so that the “enemies” will always be elusive, never eliminated or fully
defeated. There will always be more “enemies.” War will be perpetual, lasting years or even decades. War will be the final mechanism that destroys
America from within; and the people will proudly cheer and defend and support the dismantling of their rights and destruction of their Constitutional
Republic, all out of supposed “necessity” to support “the war.” | |
| Leon Uris | Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich. | |
| Veterans of Foreign Wars | Whereas it has been proposed that the United States of America
become a part of a world federal government; and ...
this program...would entail the surrender of our national sovereignty
and...bring into being a form of government whose authority would
supercede that of the Constitution of The United States Government; and
...institute a system of laws where-by American citizens
could be tried by aliens in controversion of the provisions
of the Constitution of the United States; and
...the Veterans of Foreign Wars is composed solely of men who have
worn the uniform of the United States on foreign shores and in hostile waters
in time of war and from their personal experiences
are familiar with the traditions and operations of other countries; and
...many of our comrades rest forever in foreign soil and their sacrifices
were made to retain the dignity and sovereignty of the United States of America:
Now therefore, be it Resolved by the Fiftieth Annual Convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States,
That we hereby declare that we are unalterably opposed
to any program which would entail the surrender of any part
of the sovereignty of the United States of America
in favor of a world government... | |
| Voltaire | Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities! | |
| Otto von Bismarck | A little caution outflanks a large cavalry. | |
| Karl von Clausewitz | War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means. | |
| Karl von Clausewitz | No one starts a war -- or rather no one in his senses ought to do so -- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve in that war and how he intends to conduct it. | |
| Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. | |
| Henry Wallace | In some ways, certain books are more powerful by far than any battle. | |
| James Paul Warburg | We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent. | |
| Benjamin Ward | If the major opportunities for future growth of government lie in the area of conventional taxation, are there any defenses available to the citizenry? ... Perhaps the most fruitful advice comes in two parts. The first piece of advice is to avoid war and the rumor of war: this is history's greatest boon to the tax man. ... The second piece of advice is to seek ways of inhibiting government's ability conveniently to increase its collections. Possibly the very increase in that ability that is in prospect can be turned to account by a constitutional provision which forbade the income tax, and perhaps even the storage of information regarding individual incomes by third parties, including government. | |
| Earl Warren | The censor’s sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression. | |
| Earl Warren | Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves. | |
| Earl Warren | Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society. | |
| Earl Warren | The mere summoning of a witness and compelling him to testify against his will, about his beliefs, expressions or associations, is a measure of governmental interference. And when those forced revelations concern maters that are unorthodox, unpopular, or even hateful to the general public, the reactions in the life of the witness may be disastrous. | |
| George Washington | To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. | |
| George Washington | In time of peace, prepare for war. | |
| George Washington | My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide. … Republicans and Democrats – red, yellow, black and white – have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility. … It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator. And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what’s immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance. | |
| John Wayne | We built your fort. We will not have it used against us. | |
| Daniel Webster | No power but Congress can declare war; but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war? ... [T]hese remarks originate purely in a desire to maintain the powers of government as they are established by the Constitution between the different departments, and hope that, whether we have conquests or no conquests, war or no war, peace or no peace, we shall yet preserve, in its integrity and strength, the Constitution of the United States. | |
| Daniel Webster | No power but Congress can declare war, but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war? | |
| Daniel Webster | Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... 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. | |
| Noah Webster | Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. | |
| General William Westmoreland | Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship.
Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. | |
| George Will | The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of America is justice and securing the blessings of liberty. | |
| Walter E. Williams | The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'. | |
| Charles E. Wilson | The revulsion against war ... will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here
that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? | |
| Woodrow Wilson | There is such a thing as a nation being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | If you want to make enemies, try to change something. | |
| Albert Wohlstetter | We must contemplate some extremely unpleasant possibilities, just because we want to avoid them and achieve something better. Nobody, however, likes to think about anything unpleasant, even to avoid it. And so the crucial problem of thermonuclear war is frequently dispatched with the label 'War is unthinkable' -- which, translated freely, means we don't want to think about it. | |
| C. Van Woodward | The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. | |
| C. Van Woodward | Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed. | |
| C. Van Woodward | To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views. | |
| Rene A. Wormser | The Council on Foreign Relations, another member of the international complex, financed by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, overwhelmingly propagandizes the globalist concept. This organization became virtually an agency of the government when World War II broke out. The Rockefeller Foundation had started and financed certain studies known as the War and Peace Studies, manned largely by associates of the Council; the State Department, in due course, took these studies over, retaining the major personnel which the Council on Foreign Relations had supplied. | |
| Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto | A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack. | |
| Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto | The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants. | |
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