Peace Quotes

• Any statement that begins: "I hate war..." means I am prepared to kill you in the name of peace.
• The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too. It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell. (Hermann Hagedorn)
• Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him? (Blaise Pascal)
• The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. (David Friedman)
• Draft beer, not people.
• The Establishment center...has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation. (George McGovern about the Vietnam War)
• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed and those who are cold and are not clothed.
  This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...
  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. (Dwight Eisenhower, 1953)
• Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. (Colman McCarthy)
• Funny how no one is ever arrested for yelling for war.
• Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace. (Charles Sumner)
• A good case for unlimited amnesty can be made out of the depressing fact that about the only way the average American can influence our foreign policy is by refusing to be sent abroad to fight in a war that is undeclared, unratified, and unjustified by any democratic process of telling the truth to the citizenry. (This refers to the war in Viet Nam)
• Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them! (Albert Einstein)
• History proves that war is better at abolishing nations than nations are at abolishing wars.
• I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?" (Eve Merriam)
• I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. (Dwight Eisenhower)
• I have seen war...I have seen blood running from the wounded...I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war. (Franklin Roosevelt)
• I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it. (Dwight Eisenhower)
• I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
• If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
• If everyone would fight only for their own convictions, there would be no wars. (Leo Tolstoy)
• If one soldier knew what the other thinks, there would be no war. (Yiddish Proverb)
• If peace cannot be maintained with honor, it is no longer peace. (Lord John Russell)
• If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. (Henry David Thoreau)
• I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. (George McGovern)
• In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. (Jos� Narosky)
• It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it wont be U. S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the senate. (George McGovern)
• It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war. (John F. Kennedy, 1960)
• It is not known with what weapon World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. (Albert Einstein)
• It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must work at it. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
• John C. Calhoun's reply to a toast to "the Union."
  "The Union - next to our liberty, the most dear! May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union."
• Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
• Maybe we ought to return the atom and mark it 'opened by mistake.'
• Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination. (Robert Fulghum)
• Might does not make right, it only makes history. (Jim Fiebig, NANA)
• Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. (Albert Einstein)
• Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. (Ernest Hemingway)
• No man should be so foolish as to desire war more than peace: for in peace sons bury their fathers; but in war, fathers bury their sons. (from The Drifters by James A. Michener)
• Old soldiers never die. Young soldiers do.
• One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society...shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. (Martin Luther King, Jr)
• Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. (General Omar N. Bradley)
• Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. (Guy de Maupassant)
• The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service. (Albert Einstein)
• The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without. (Dwight D. Eisenhower)
• The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (Albert Einstein)
• Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him. (M*A*S*H, Colonel Potter)
• Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases...found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second. (S.L.A. Marshall)
• There has never been a good war or a bad peace. (Benjamin Franklin)
• There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. (Henry Havelock Ellis)
• There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. (Martin Luther King, Jr. - 1963)
• There would be fewer wars if we tried to determine what's right instead of who's right.
• To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill. (Sun Tsu)
• The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst. (Henry Fosdick)
• War doesn't prove who is right; only who is left.
• War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
• War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. (John F. Kennedy)
• War would end if the dead could return. (Stanley Baldwin)
• Wars have never hurt anybody...except the people who die. (Salvador Dali)
• We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. (Dwight D. Eisenhower)
• We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. (Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick)
• We should wage war not to win war, but to win peace. (Paul Hoffman)
• What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world. (Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864)
• What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble? (Benjamin Spock)
• When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.
• When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
• You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. (Jeanette Rankin)

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