Bertha von Suttner

“ This is a fresh encouragement to our endeavors, a new reason to hope for good results. To be sure there are still many prejudices to meet, and perhaps also enmities to overcome; but that is only one more reason for recognizing the necessity of having our efforts supported by an imposing number of representatives of all nations. It is time, it is high time, that genuinely universal demonstrations should—by encouraging the timid—call forth an uprising of the conscience of mankind, and that society should stand on its guard against the ruin, the misery, the crime, by which it is threatened. ”

“ To unite in face of a common enemy, we must be reconciled; to defend civilization against barbarism, let us begin by being civilized ourselves; if we desire to protect society from the danger which the action of a madman may inflict upon it, let us, first of all, do away with the thousandfold more terrible danger which the frown of one of the mighty of the earth would be sufficient to let loose upon it; if we wish to punish the lawless, let us recognize a law above ourselves; if we wish to parry the blows of the desperate, let us cease to spend billions in fomenting despair. ”

“ If ever assistance, consolation, support were required in a spiritual campaign, in an ethical dilemma, all one had to do was to produce the check book; Egidy was certain to honor it instantly. Always the right word, the unhesitating opinion, nobility pure of dross. Even if there were heard on all sides: “The world is bad, every one thinks only of himself, there is no improvement, there are no clear notions of duty, no straight paths of virtue,” we could always smile calmly and say to ourselves, “That is not true; there is an Egidy here.” ”

“ If I look back into my childhood and youth, I do not see myself as the same person, as having altered, but see standing side by side the most diverse girl forms, each with a different horizon of ideas and filled with different hopes, interests, and sensations. And if I set beside them the forms from my maturer womanhood, or my present age, what have I (beyond the mere recollection, as faint as the recollection of pictures long since seen, or books long since read) in common with those phantoms, or they with me? Dissolving mists, flying shadows, a passing breath, is what life is. ”

“ I am near you, Frederick—be assured of that—with every thought, with every breath, by day and night. Here, in my own circle, I move and act and speak mechanically. My innermost self, that belongs to you, that never leaves you for a moment; only my boy reminds me that the world still contains for me a thing which is not you. The good little fellow—if you knew how he asks and cares for you! ”

“ I was not disturbed by any inkling of the shadow of a possibility that one could think of war’s not being in the world at all. As well might one think of leaves not being on the trees, or waves on the sea. Why, war is the form in which human history accomplishes itself: the founding of empires, the settlement of controversies, are seen to by war. ”

“ All institutions stand on roots of a thousand fibres, and as long as they exist it must be a good thing that those feelings and methods of thought should persist by which they are excused, by which they are rendered not only tolerable, but even beloved. How many a poor fellow is helped through his death-agony by that same ‘joy in death’ into which he has been educated! how many a pious soul relies in all confidence on the help of God of which he has been assured by the preacher! how much innocent vanity and proud feeling of honour are awakened and satisfied by those ceremonies! ”

“ For us Northlanders the sunrise can mean so much more than for the people to the south of us; we expect it only once in a while, and greet it as a miracle. The darkness was so oppressively long, the silence so mysterious, the first glow over the rocky peaks so deceptive! It lasts and lasts and ever grows—but still no sun! Even when the sky is already streaming full of hope—yet still no sun! ”

“ I can still remember how I felt in the greenhouse where the florist took our order: how damp and warm it smelt there, how the red and white and yellow blossoms flamed round about—but loveliest among all the gay flower-mosaic the blue of a mass of cornflowers. Would we not look like elves of the field, so fresh and unassuming and poetic?—And that in the brightly lighted ballroom! We should make a sensation, and we were blissful—blissful as ever silly girls can be before their first ball, which they really have not yet any proper right to attend. ”

“ Troops of men kept coming from outside into the city with all their belongings. Oh, those sorrowful trains of carts and pack horses, and laden men, who were trailing the ruins of their desolated hearths through the streets! I had already seen the same thing once in Bohemia, when the poor country folk were flying from the enemy; and now I had to look on the same picture of wretchedness in the joyous, brilliant capital of the world. There were the same frightened, sorrowful visages, the same weariness and haste, the same woe.
At last, God be praised, once more a good piece of news! ”

“ The shouts of martial comradeship which are uttered here and there on the occasion of various welcomes to fleets, and which may so easily be interpreted as the expression of a desire for war on the part of the peoples, ought no longer to be so misunderstood: have we really not yet learned that there is nothing more epidemic than hurrahs and vivas? that these shouts must always, on behalf of every cause, rend the air as soon as the first signal is given—by a natural necessity, like the rolling of thunder after the flash of lightning? ”

“ I have seen horrors, Frederick, that I can never forget. Oh! this beautiful world of ours, how can people so spoil it, Frederick? A world in which two beings can so love each other as you and I do, in which there can glow such a fire of bliss as is our union, how can it be so foolish as to rake up the flames of hate which brings death and woe in its train?”
“I also have seen something horrible, Martha—something that I can never forget. Just think of Godfrey v. Tessow{285} rushing wildly upon me with uplifted sword—it was in the cavalry action at Sadowa.” ”

“ Establish an international reign of law—fuse into one group the separate groups which constantly swear to each other that if attacked by some other group they will fight shoulder to shoulder—found the alliance of the civilized states of Europe?
The various alliances now stand face to face as equals in power and dignity. What is to hinder their making what they now set as their aim—peace—the foundation of their existence? ”

“ The heroic poems and the heroic histories by whose means our schools bring us up to be warriors, these are what are set vibrating in our brains by the thunders of the cannonade, the flash of naked weapons, and the shouts of the combatants. And the freedom from ordinary circumstances, the inexplicable freedom from law in which one finds oneself all of a sudden, makes one feel as if transported into another world—it is like an outlook beyond this trumpery earthly existence, with its peaceful domestic quiet, into a titanic struggle of infernal spirits. ”