Quotes and text excerpts about "war"

“ War is the mother of wrong and spoliation: war is a scourge of God—granted; but, like other scourges in the divine economy, war purifies and redeems itself in its character of a counterforce to greater evils that could not otherwise be intercepted or redressed. ”

“ WAR IS PART OF THE INTERCOURSE OF THE HUMAN RACE.
We say therefore War belongs not to the province of Arts and Sciences, but to the province of social life. It is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others. It would be better, instead of comparing it with any Art, to liken it to business competition, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still more like State policy, which again, on its part, may be looked upon as a kind of business competition on a great scale. ”

“ War is supreme as an agent of destruction. It destroys not only nations and governments, life and property, but also it blunts civilization, coarsens refinement, stops study and progress, prevents the fulfillment of life-cherished plans and ambitions, changes the life purpose of millions of men. ”

“ War is a phase of the whole process of social development of nations. We think of nations as living and growing, and of a world which is gradually maturing. War obtains a natural explanation on sociological and psychological principles, not as a disease, but as a natural consequence and condition of the formation of nations, or of any type of horde or group. In the course of the development of nations we see psychological factors coming more and more to the front. Desires which are more or less consciously avowed become the motives of history. ”

“ War is a conflict between two groups, each of which attempts to kill and maim as many as possible of the other group in order to achieve some object which it desires. The object is generally either power or wealth. It is a pleasure to exercise authority over other men, and it is a pleasure to live on the produce of other men's labor. The victor in war can enjoy more of these delights than the vanquished. But war, like all other natural activities, is not so much prompted by the end which it has in view as by an impulse to the activity itself. ”

“ War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence. For instead of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn. ”

“ War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf states and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities. We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement. We are adopting such measures as will minimize our risk of involvement, but we cannot have complete protection in a world of disorder in which confidence and security have broken down. ”

“ War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. "War is the father of all things." ”

“ The popular idea that war is a mere matter of brute force, redeemed only by valour and discipline, is responsible for a Statesmen and war. greater evil than the complacency of the amateur. It blinds both the people and its representatives to their bounden duties. War is something more than a mere outgrowth of politics. It is a political act, initiated and controlled by the government, and it is an act of which the issues are far more momentous than any other. No branch of political science requires more careful study. ”

“ War, being a game in which each side forces the other into the instant adoption of all improvements through the mere necessities of self-preservation, became continually more intellectual.
It is interesting to observe the steps by which, were it only through impulses of self-conservation, and when searching with a view to more effectual destructiveness, war did and must refine itself from a horrid trade of butchery into a magnificent and enlightened science. ”

“ WAR—WHAT FOR? is, at the present time, the bestselling, non-fiction, cloth-bound book in American revolutionary literature. In selling WAR—WHAT FOR? stick to the facts. The burning facts in the book sell the book. Present the facts to parents. Present the facts to the boys. Present the facts to organized and unorganized workers. Present the facts to farmers. Present the facts to professional people. Present simply a few of the many facts to be easily found in the book—and the book will sell itself. ”

“ The war is what it has to be. Did it surprise you to find out that war is horrible? The only surprising thing was the going off. To find out that women are cruel—that was the surprising thing. That they can smile and throw roses; that they can give up their husbands, their children, the little boys they have put to bed a thousand times, tucked up a thousand times, have fondled, have created from their own flesh and blood. ”

“ War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate coöperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. ”

“ War is a sudden, violent and spectacular destroyer of all established habits. In its conduct and preparation it has rules of its own which have no analogy in civil life. The battlefield is a reversion to the primitive; a reversion which man finds it easy to make, for it appeals to fundamental instincts which civilization holds in leash with great difficulty and never with entire success. War especially appeals to the young. Their desire for activity, their impatience with restraint, their love of the spectacular, their untrained emotions, all find a ready outlet in war. ”

“ The most unwarlike of men are haunted by the fear that perpetual peace would induce a general degeneration of soul and body such as they now behold amid the rich man's sheltered comforts. They dread the growth of a population slack of nerve, soft of body, cruel through fear of pain, and incapable of endurance or high endeavour. They dread the entire disappearance of that clear decisiveness, that disregard of pleasure, that quiet devotion of self in the face of instant death, which are to be found, now and again, in the course of every war. ”

“ I look upon war as a sort of pestilence, a contagion which spreads under certain conditions. But we disguise the evil of it from ourselves, if we allow ourselves to believe in its being intrinsically glorious. I can't believe that highway robbery has only to be organised on a sufficiently large scale to make it glorious. A man who resists highway robbery, and runs the risk of death, because he wants to put a stop to it, seems to me a noble person—quite different from the man who sees a row going on and joins in it because he does not want to be out of a good thing! ”

“ The world is at war. Already more than a score of nations, representing a population of over a thousand millions, or two-thirds of the entire human race, are engaged in a life-and-death struggle on the bloody battlefields of Europe, Asia, and Africa. No man can stand in the mouth of that volcano on a battle front, or meet the trains pouring in with their weary freight of wounded after a battle, or stand by the operating tables and the long rows of cots in the hospitals, or share in sympathy the hardship and suffering of the men who are fighting for us, and remain unmoved. ”

“ Why do great States wage war nowadays? The only sound principle of action for a great State is political egoism and not Romanticism, and it is unworthy of a great State to fight for any matter which does not concern its own interests. Shew us, gentlemen, an object worthy of war and you have my vote. It is easy for a statesman in his office or his chamber to blow the trumpet with the breath of popularity and all the time to sit warming himself by his fireside, while he leaves it to the rifleman, who lies bleeding on the snow, whether his system attains victory and glory. Nothing is easier ”

“ The ground of a political war is of all things that which the poor laborer and manufacturer are the least capable of conceiving. This sort of people know in general that they must suffer by war. It is a matter to which they are sufficiently competent, because it is a matter of feeling. The causes of a war are not matters of feeling, but of reason and foresight, and often of remote considerations, and of a very great combination of circumstances which they are utterly incapable of comprehending: and, indeed, it is not every man in the highest classes who is altogether equal to it. ”

“ It is the fact that war is a great ecstasy of the social life, that it holds a high place in art, that history—our selective way of reacting upon human experience—is in a large measure the story of war, that its representations in dramatic forms are almost endless in variety; it is such facts that give us our clew to the nature of the problems of war, and also to the practical questions of its future. ”

“ While I am personally against war, I am in favor of the country having what it wants. If the country wants war, let it have war, but let it first find out if the country does want war. If it becomes necessary to ascertain the sentiment of the country, I suggest that a ballot be taken; let those who want war vote for war and those opposed to war vote against it, and let the vote be taken with the understanding that those who vote for war will enlist for war and that those who vote against war will not be called upon until after those who want war have exhausted their efforts. ”

“ No patriot makes money out of war. No man with true patriotism could make money out of war—out of the sacrifice of other men's lives. Until the soldier makes money by fighting, until mothers make money by giving their sons to death—not until then should any citizen make money out of providing his country with the means to preserve its life.
If wars are to continue, it will be harder and harder for the upright business man to regard war as a legitimate means of high and speedy profits. War fortunes are losing caste every day. ”

“ No one can do anything to prevent war who does not recognize its splendour, for it is by its splendour that it keeps its hold on humanity, and persists. The wickedest and most selfish war in the world is not fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of man is immense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, a sense of fellowship, offers this frail and complicated tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin or a grain of sand will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities that the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and poison. ”

“ It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. ”

“ Enlightened 3 men cannot but know that occasions for war are always such as are not worth not only one human life, but not one hundredth part of all that which is spent upon wars (in fighting for the emancipation of the negroes much more was spent than it would have cost to redeem them from slavery) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has often been said that one man is as good as another; that personality is nothing, the type is everything; but this assertion is erroneous. In time of peace, when sham reputations flourish and no real struggle winnows the chaff from the coin, mediocrity in performance is enough. But in war, personality turns the scale. Responsibility and danger bring out personality, and show its real worth, as surely as a chemical test separates the pure metal from the dross.
That army is fortunate which has placed men of this kind in the important posts during peace-time and has kept them there. ”

“ It is not in the waning days of life, but in the full strength of youth, that men, through ambition or the mere love of excitement, fearlessly and joyously encounter its risk. Encountered in hot blood it is seldom feared, and innumerable accounts of shipwrecks and other accidents, and many episodes in every war, show conclusively how calmly honour, duty, and discipline can enable men of no extraordinary characters, virtues, or attainments, to meet it even when it comes before them suddenly, as an inevitable fact, and without any of that excitement which might blind their eyes. ”

“ All human affairs are mental affairs; the bright ideas of to-day are the realities of to-morrow. The real history of mankind is the history of how ideas have arisen, how they have taken possession of men's minds, how they have struggled, altered, proliferated, decayed. There is nothing in this war at all but a conflict of ideas, traditions, and mental habits. The German Will clothed in conceptions of aggression and fortified by cynical falsehood, struggles against the fundamental sanity of the German mind and the confused protest of mankind. ”

“ Recall to mind the tragic and paradoxical truth that human life, which is the highest work and appears to have been the purpose of the creation of the world, is that for which, on the whole, that great work appears to care the least. Whatever part man may be called to play, his destiny is to pass away. That horror of war with which we are inspired by the extermination of men is in the long run kept up and perpetuated by material depredations; the memory of an illustrious building destroyed will last longer than that of a hundred thousand young men mown down in their youth. ”

“ A swift and vigorous assumption of the offensive—the flashing sword of vengeance—is the most brilliant point in the defensive; he who does not at once think of it at the right moment, or rather he who does not from the first include this transition in his idea of the defensive will never understand the superiority of the defensive as a form of war; he will be for ever thinking only of the means which will be consumed by the enemy and gained by ourselves through the offensive, which means however depend not on tying the knot, but on untying it. ”

“ Patriotism is a will to be nationally significant. It is national pride. It is national ambition, a will to self-respect and the respect of others, a will to national standing, greatness, distinction, importance, power. The existence of this will to be significant is why nations are so sensitive on points of honor and prestige. Their national significance is lowered if they allow, let us say, a public insult to go unavenged. It is a reason why nations cannot back down in a war when it once gets started, and why they can all be for peace after the war, but not while it is being waged. ”

“ Man is certainly an animal that, when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honor. ”

“ A man with the social conception of life cannot resist. The aim of his life is his personal welfare. It is better for his personal welfare for him to submit, and he submits.
Whatever they do to him, however they torture or humiliate him, he will submit, for, alone, he can do nothing; he has no principle for the sake of which he could resist violence alone. And those who control them never allow them to unite together. It is often said that the invention of terrible weapons of destruction will put an end to war. ”