War! What Is It Good For? Quotes

“War, I will suggest, has not been a friend to the undertaker. War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer. War is hell, but—again, over the long run—the alternatives would have been worse.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“A Nellis légitámaszponton hallottam egy viccet, amely szerint a jövőben a légierő mindössze egy emberből, egy kutyából és egy számítógépből áll majd. Az ember feladata lesz, hogy etesse a kutyát, a kutyáé pedig az, nehogy az ember hozzányúljon a számítógéphez.”
― Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots

“Az uralkodó az államtól függ - írta a császár, Taj-Csung [626-642] -, és az állam a néptől függ. Ha elnyomjuk a népet, hogy így szolgálja az uralkodót, az olyan lenne, mintha valaki a saját húsából vágna egy darabot, hogy azzal töltse meg a saját gyomrát. A gyomrát ugyan megtölti, de a teste megsérül; az uralkodó vagyonos lesz ugyan, de az állam elpusztul”
― Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots

“Europe—at least when it came to gunnery—had more in common with southern than with northern China. It was full of forts, had plenty of broken landscapes that constrained armies’ movements, and, because it was so far from the steppes (which made cavalry expensive), its armies always included a lot of slow-moving infantry. In this environment, tinkering with guns to squeeze out small improvements made a great deal of sense, and by 1600 so many improvements had accumulated that European armies were becoming the best on earth.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“The hotbed of innovation was initially southern China, because the wars against the Mongol overlords of the mid-fourteenth-century Yangzi Valley would be won by storming fortresses and sinking big ships fighting in the constrained space of a river. For both these jobs, early guns were excellent. But when the fighting ended in 1368, the main theater of war shifted to the steppes in northern China. Here there were few forts to bombard, and slow-firing guns were useless against fast-moving cavalry. Chinese generals, being rational men, spent their money on extra horsemen and a great wall rather than incremental improvements in firearms.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“The answer to the question in this book’s title is both paradoxical and horrible. War has been good for making humanity safer and richer, but it has done so through mass murder. But because war has been good for something, we must recognize that all this misery and death was not in vain. Given a choice of how to get from the poor, violent Stone Age to the peace and prosperity of Figures 7.1 and 7.2, few of us, I am sure, would want war to be the way, but evolution—which is what human history is—is not driven by what we want. In the end, the only thing that matters is the grim logic of the game of death.”
― Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots

“Perhaps because they were so convinced that traitors rather than the arrival of American troops had cost them victory in 1918, few Nazi leaders ever understood that the real problem for their long-term plans was the United States, not Britain. Nothing else can explain why, just days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the Americans rather than hoping that the war in the Pacific would distract them from Europe. “What does the USA amount to anyway?” asked Hermann Göring, the head of the German air force. Churchill, however, saw exactly what it amounted to. “Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death,” he said of hearing the news about Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all!”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“The goal of fighting, Wilson told the Senate in January 1917, must be “peace without victory,” because “victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished.” As Wilson saw it, “only a peace between equals can last,” meaning that “the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.” In place of one mighty empire acting as globocop, Wilson proposed a league of nations, “a single and overwhelming powerful group of nations who shall be the trustee of peace in the world.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“The United States seemed ready to drive Britain out of its job as globocop, but this was the last thing on most Americans’ minds. Some adhered to Thomas Jefferson’s hope for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”; others worried more about avoiding entangling expenses; but others still, including President Woodrow Wilson, dreamed of something completely different.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“They manned the forward positions lightly, rotating troops in and out of the line to keep them fresh. Most men stayed back out of artillery range, letting the enemy capture the front lines and counterattacking when the assault outran its artillery cover. The”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“Russians and Ottomans pinched off the western end of the steppes between 1500 and 1650; in central Asia, Mughals and Persians pushed the Uzbeks and Afghans back between 1600 and 1700; and in the east, China swallowed up the endless wastes of Xinjiang between 1650 and 1750. By 1727, when Russian and Chinese officials met at Kiakhta to sign a treaty fixing their borders in Mongolia, the gunpowder empires had effectively shut down the steppe highway.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“The real issue, the historian turned attorney Kenneth Chase explains in his magnificent book Firearms: A Global History to 1700, was not how many but what kinds of wars Europeans and Asians fought.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“Some historians propose a very down-to-earth answer to all these questions. Europe’s firearms revolution, they argue, had nothing to do with cultural traditions: Europeans simply got good with guns because they fought a lot. Europe, the theory runs, was divided into lots of little states that were always at each other’s throats. China, by contrast, was a unified empire for most of the time between 1368 and 1911. As a result, the Chinese rarely fought and had little reason to invest in improving guns. For the feuding Europeans, however, investing in better guns was literally a matter of life and death. Therefore it was Europeans, not Chinese, who perfected the gun.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots

“You may not be very interested in war, Trotsky is supposed to have said, but war is very interested in you.”
― Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots