The next war ... may well bury Western civilization forever.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac…We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act…
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
--George Orwell
“War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“These wars teach us nothing, not even how to conquer our fears. We are still cave men. Democratic cave men, perhaps, but that is small comfort. Our fight is to get out of the cave. If we were to make the least effort in that direction we would inspire the whole world.”
"As Democrats, Republicans, Fascists, Communists, we are all on one level. That is one of the reasons why we wage war so beautifully. We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us...We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed."
~ Henry Miller
“War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.”
~ Ernest Becker
“There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
—Neil Gaiman
“We believe peace can kill us. So we live in a permanent state of war. We no longer can contrive a way to run an economy without war… We have been at war for over a century now and it has bankrupted our treasury, destroyed our land, corrupted our people, and fouled our bed. We are creatures of fear, supplicants, and we expect to be taken care of by something and we do not expect to be loved or give love.”
~ Charles Bowden
“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. ”
― William S. Burroughs
“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”
—Blaise Pascal
“Yes, it looks like this country is in for another one. The idiot concepts of our leaders are endless. It all makes me sick straight on through. Nothing has been learned from the past. Just new bodies, new waste, new hell. Always a new excuse for more war…yes, I am sick with it all. It sits in my gut churning and they go on ahead.”
~ Bukowski
“War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.”
--Paul Valery
“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.”
—Leo Tolstoy
“There is every reason to be sad at this moment: all the premonitions which I have had for ten years are coming true. This is one of the lowest moments in the history of the human race. There is no sign of hope on the horizon. The whole world is involved in slaughter and bloodshed. I repeat—I am not sad. Let the world have its bath of blood…”
— Henry Miller
“Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.”
~ Robert Anton Wilson
“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.”
~ Hunter S. Thompson
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over-consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
― Aldous Huxley
“The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses. Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War.
He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and with calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.”
— Mark Twain
“My life has been spent inside a culture of constant war and of vast slaughter of the beasts of the field and the grasses and forests of the land and of the fish in the sea and of the blue sky I was born under at the tail end of one of those wars.
I am of that culture and yet I am against that culture.
I am of my time and yet out of my time.
I drive fast down freeways but I have no belief that these roads lead to a future. Nor do I fear or dread the future. But I do fear for my culture and the human beings within and the beasts and plants without it that suffer in silence.”
-- Charles Bowden
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