Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations. . . . The root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.
—Dorothy L. Sayers
History is a vast early warning system.
—Norman Cousins
I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to [travel to] Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.
—Senator J. William Fulbright
It is isolation that is critical to war. You can't be abusive when you realize your connectedness.
—David Kadlec
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.
—François de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
—Ernest Hemingway
Making weapons is what we know how to do best, the supreme achievement of late-twentieth-century American civilization. To this blessed work we assign our finest intellect and the largest share of our treasure, and in the magnificence of an aircraft carrier or a cruise missile we find our moral and aesthetic equivalent of the Sistine ceiling and Chartres Cathedral.
—Lewis Lapham
Q: What's the difference between religion and patriotism?
A: When a dog howls at the moon, that's religion. When a dog barks at a stranger, that's patriotism.
—Unknown
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
—Simone Weil
If I got to make just one law, it would be that the men who make the decisions to drop bombs would first, every time, have to spend one whole day taking care of a baby. We were not made to do this killing thing, I swear. Back up. It's a big mistake.
—Barbara Kingsolver
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
—Jeannette Rankin
Say yes when nobody asked.
—Lao proverb
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
—Pema Chödrön
People should worry about each other. Because worry is just love in its worst form. But it's still love.
—Simon Gray