"War is what happens when language fails."
— Margaret Atwood

"War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Two Towers)

"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
— Herbert Hoover

"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."
— Thomas Jefferson

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

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

"The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Looked into the sky, heavy with smoke and human fat, and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. It is not God that kills the children, not fate the butchers them, nor destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"for the dead and the living, we must bear witness."
— Elie Wiesel

"SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."
— W.H. Auden

"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
— George Orwell

"I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?"
— Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment)

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril. "
— Winston S. Churchill

"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
— Bertolt Brecht (Selected Poems)

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

"She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred."
— Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)

"Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition."
— George S. Patton Jr.

"Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate."
— Alice Walker

"The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on."
— William Faulkner (A Fable)

"It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"...in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them"
— Thomas Jefferson

"He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Chronicle of a Death Foretold)

"War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war."
— William Faulkner (A Fable)

"Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won."
— Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

"The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …” "
— George Orwell

"The use of force is always an answer to problems...[It] isn't an attractive answer, though."
— David Drake (The Voyage)

"God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.
Surely, while we live we are not lost.
Oh Janos, Janos my brother!
Surely we are not lost--while we live."
— John Hepworth

"The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking"
— Marvin Bell (Mars Being Red)

"I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?"
— William Shakespeare (Henry V)

"Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal."
— Leslie Charteris (The Last Hero)

"Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"...not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo."
— Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

"The story is about being loyal to the truth as a nation, that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their troops do in war, good or bad."
— Kevin Sites (In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty-one Wars)

"War...is ugly and brutalizing, and the nobility is in doing it without becoming ugly and brutalizing."
— Dana Kramer-Rolls (Way of the Cat: Nap, Do Nothing and Stretch Your Way to a Blissful Life)

"--Why are we fighting them?
--They're mad. We're sane.
--How do we know?
--That we're sane?
--Yes.
--Am I sane?
--To all appearances.
--And you, do you consider yourself sane?
--I do.
--Well, there you have it.
--But don't they also consider themselves sane?
--I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane.
--How must that make them feel?
--Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane."
— Donald Barthelme

"Even the king's Erkynguard might have wished to be elsewhere, rather than here on this killing ground where duty brought them and loyalty prisoned them. Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old god who had lost His grip."
— Tad Williams (To Green Angel Tower)

"...all the horrors of war are soon forgotten in the pomp and circumstance of show and parade."
— Corporal James Henry Gooding

"Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do _that_? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan...Can _you_ take the glamour out of a Cobra, or getting stoned at China Beach? It's like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn." He pointed to a picture he'd taken, Flynn laughing maniacally ("We're winning," he'd said), triumphantly. "Nothing the matter with _that_ boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is _good_ for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." He was really speechless, working his hands up and down to emphasize the sheer insanity of it.

"I mean, you _know_ that it just _can't be done!_" We both shrugged and laughed, and Page looked very thoughtful for a moment. "The very _idea!_" he said. "Ohhh, what a laugh! Take the bloody _glamour_ out of bloody _war!"
— Michael Herr (Dispatches)