Peace & Anti-War Quotes

"The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses." -Edward Abbey

"The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred." -Daniel Berrigan

"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. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." –Julius Caesar (fake quote, but still good)

"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one." -Agatha Christie

"How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they're forever banned?...How many deaths will it takes till he knows that too many people have died?" -Bob Dylan

"The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service." -Albert Einstein

"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -Albert Einstein

"There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it." -Havelock Ellis

"I hope...that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for in my opinion there never was a good war, or a bad peace." -Benjamin Franklin

"Peace we want because there is another war to fight against poverty, disease and ignorance." -Indira Gandhi

"You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist." -Indira Gandhi

"An eye for eye makes the whole world blind." -Mahatma Gandhi

"All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them." -Emma Goldman

"We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens." -Emma Goldman

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." -Jimi Hendrix

"Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals." -Ammon Hennacy, US Labor leader

"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war." -Abbie Hoffman

"And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." -Isaiah 2:4

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

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind." -JFK

"Everything, everything in war is barbaric...But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being." -Ellen Key

"An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder." -Coretta Scott King

"Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

"War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off." -Karl Kraus

"If I am brutal, and you use brutal methods to overcome me, you become brutal just like me." -Krishnamarti

"If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say 'No' to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses." -Louis Lecoin, French pacifist leader

"All we are saying is give peace a chance." -John Lennon

"Fondly do we hope, ferverently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away." -Abraham Lincoln

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." -Friedrich Nietzche

"War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes." -Thomas Paine

"Two wrongs don't make a right." -Proverb

"Spoils, glory, flags and trumpets! What is behind these high-sounding words? Death and destruction, triumphals of crippled men, Sweden victorious in a ravaged Europe, an island in a dead sea. I tell you, I want no more of it. I want for my people security and happiness. I want to cultivate the arts of peace, the arts of life. I want peace and peace I will have!" -Queen Christina of Sweden, in the movie Queen Christina, calling for an end to the Thirty Years' War.

"You can no more win a war than win an earthquake." -Jeanette Rankin

"War does not determine who is right — only who is left." -Bertrand Russell

"Someday they'll give a war and nobody will come." -Carl Sandburg

"When the rich make war, it's the poor that die." -Jean-Paul Sartre

"4000 hungry children
Leave us per hour from starvation
While billions are spent on bombs
Creating death showers"
-System of a Down, "Boom!"

"Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?" -Leo Tolstoy

"War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves." -Leo Tolstoy

"Killing for peace is like fucking for chastity." -Unknown

"Wars are not acts of God. They are caused by man, by man-made institutions, by the way in which man has organized his society. What man has made, man can change." -Frederick Moore Vinson

"Away with themes of war! away with war itself!
Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken'd, mutilated corpses!
That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for lop-tongued wolves, not reasoning men,
And in its stead speed industry's campaigns,
With thy undaunted armies, engineering,
Thy pennants labor, loosen'd to the breeze,
Thy bugles sounding loud and clear."
-Walt Whitman, "Song of the Exposition"

"Even for a good purpose war is absurd. By its nature, by its technology, war has become so massive and indiscriminate that no possible good can come of it." -Howard Zinn, radical historian

"When I spoke recently on a radio show in Madison, Wisconsin, a caller asked: Why, grieving as we all should for the thousands of victims of the September 11 action, were we not grieving also for the thousands of people who die on the job, in industrial accidents?
"We could extend that question: Why are we not grieving also for the thousands of children who die every year in this country for lack of food and medical care?
"The answer seems clear: To do that would call attention not to obscure foreign terrorists but to a system of corporate domination in which profits come before the safety of workers. It would call attention to a political system in which the government can fund hundreds of billions for its military machine but cannot find the money to give free health care, decent housing, minimum family incomes--all those requisites for children to grow up healthy." -Howard Zinn, radical historian, "Operation Enduring War"

"Our most deadly enemies are not in caves and compounds abroad but in the corporate boardrooms and governmental offices where decisions are made that consign millions to death and misery — not deliberately, but as the collateral damage of the lust for profit and power." -Howard Zinn, radical historian, "Operation Enduring War"

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