Selected from the Winter 2008 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
No matter how often told, the story begins with a call to arms and ends with a cortege of postmortems.
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. War is hell.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
There never was a good war or a bad peace.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1773
War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade; And to those royal murderers whose mean thrones Are bought by crimes of treachery and gore, The bread they eat, the staff on which they lean. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1813
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
—John Stuart Mill, 1862
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of the line—the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
—Orson Welles, 1949
I went [to war] because I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want the glory or the pay; I wanted the right thing done.
—Louisa May Alcott, 1863
A civil war is like heat of a fever, but a foreign war is like the heat of exercise and serveth to keep the body in health.
—Francis Bacon, 1625
The free man is a warrior. He tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort that grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats worship.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889
And is not war a youthful king, A stately hero clad in mail? Beneath his footsteps laurels spring; Him earth’s majestic monarchs hail Their friend, their playmate! And his bold bright eye Compels the maiden’s love-confessing sigh. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1799
Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.
War is sweet to those who don’t know it.
—Desiderius Erasmus, 1508
I shall always respect war hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of eternal life, eternal law, reconstructing and uplifting society—breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider vista.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1864
War is a game, but unfortunately the cards, counters, and fishes suffer by an ill run more than the gamesters.
—Horace Walpole, 1788
War is the health of the state.
—Randolph Bourne, 1918
There is no state whose leader does not wish to secure permanent peace by conquering all the universe.
—Immanuel Kant, 1795
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
—Carl Sandburg, 1936
War to the castles; peace to the cottages.
—Nicolas Chamfort, 1790
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
—Stanley Kubrick, 1963
For every state, war is always incessant and lifelong against every other state. For what most men call “peace,” this is really only a name—in truth, all states by their very nature are always engaged in an informal war against all other states.
—Plato, c. 350 BC
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong, 1938
The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning; Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air, And he that stands will die for nought, and home there’s no returning. The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair. —A.E. Housman, 1922
War is the child of pride, and pride the daughter of riches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1697
There is more of misery inflicted upon mankind by one year of war than by all the civil peculations and oppressions in a century. Yet it is a state into which the mass of mankind rush with a greatest avidity, hailing official murderers, in scarlet, gold, and cock’s feathers, as the greatest and most glorious of human creatures.
—Sydney Smith, 1813
To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the cardinal virtues.
—Thomas Hobbes, 1651
To lead an uninstructed people to war, is to throw them away.
—Confucius, sixth century BC
The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools.
—Thucydides, fifth century BC
If McClellan is not using the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1862
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