Quotations on / about war

Lanza del Vasto noted a deep connection between play and war, even before the games theory and nuclear war strategy became practically identified. In our society, everything, in fact, is a game. But if everything is a game, then everything leads to war. Play is aimless and yet multiplies obstacles so that the "aim," which in fact does not exist, cannot be attained by the opponent. For instance, getting a ball in a hole. War is caused by similar aimless aims. Not by hunger, not by real need. War is a game of the powerful, or of whole collectivities devoted to self-assertion. It is "the great public vice that consists in playing with the lives of men." War plays with life and death, and does so magnificently. Everybody becomes involved. Everybody has to live or die—so that other side may not get a ball in a hole.

(Thomas Merton (1915-1968), U.S. religious writer, poet. "The Fork in the Road," Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Doubleday (1966).)
More quotations from: Thomas Merton

We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it. A war does not end with the Armistice. In 1919, all over a Europe filled with graves, hung miasmas and miseries, and over the whole world too, because of the flu and its nearly thirty million deaths. I used to joke that it was the war that had give birth to me, as a defence when weary with the talk about the war that went on—and on—and on. But it was no joke. I used to feel there was something like a dark grey cloud, like poison gas, over my early childhood. Later I found people who had the same experience. Perhaps it was from that war that I first felt the struggling panicky need to escape, with a nervous aversion to where I have just stood, as if something there might blow up or drag me down by the heel.

(Doris Lessing (b. 1919), British novelist. Under My Skin, ch. 1, p. 10, Harper Collins (1994).)
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I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war.

(Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), U.S. First Lady, author, and speaker. As quoted in Eleanor and Franklin, ch. 46, by Joseph P. Lash (1971). Written on January 2, 1938. Roosevelt was abandoning her earlier pacifism in the face of the fascist threat.)
More quotations from: Eleanor Roosevelt

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view "realistically"; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

(Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. AIDS and Its Metaphors, ch. 1 (1989).)
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This is not Johnson's war. This is America's war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

(Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), U.S. president. Lyndon Johnson's War, preface, p. vi, W.W. Norton (1989). On Vietnam.)
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I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

(Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), U.S. author, speaker, and First Lady. As quoted in Eleanor: The Years Alone, ch. 5, by Joseph P. Lash (1972). In a June 28, 1947, letter to President Harry S. Truman.)
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My home policy: I wage war; my foreign policy: I wage war. All the time I wage war.

(Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), French statesman. Speech, July 20, 1919, Chamber of Deputies. Discours de Guerre (1968).)
More quotations from: Georges Clemenceau

Our job is now clear. All Americans must be prepared to make, on a 24 hour schedule, every war weapon possible and the war factory line will use men and materials which will bring, the war effort to every man, woman, and child in America. All one hundred thirty million of us will be needed to answer the sunrise stealth of the Sabbath Day Assassins.

(Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), U.S. president. "Statement, Pearl Harbor," LBJ Library, "Speech Collection," (December 8, 1941). A response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.)
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War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to "feel good" about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.

(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet and essayist. What is Found There, ch. 3 (1993). Written in January 1991.)
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Signal smokes, war drums, feathered bonnets against the western sky. New messiahs, young leaders are ready to hurl the finest light cavalry in the world against Fort Stark. In the Kiowa village, the beat of drums echoes in the pulsebeat of the young braves. Fighters under a common banner, old quarrels forgotten, Comanche rides with Arapaho, Apache with Cheyenne. All chant of war. War to drive the white man forever from the red man's hunting ground.

(Frank S. Nugent (1908-1965), U.S. screenwriter, Laurence Stallings, and John Ford. Narrator, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, commentary on the young Indian fighters' united effort to defeat the cavalry (1949). Based on the story "War Party" by James Warner Bellah.)
More quotations from: Frank S Nugent