Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic.
—James Hinton
Weapons of mass destruction are always in the wrong hands.
—Deepak Chopra
What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons.
—Martin Amis
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
—David Friedman
A wrong war brings wrong; so does a right war.
—Ignazio Silone
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.
—Lyndon B. Johnson
It’s odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian don’t hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and, most entertainingly, to “rid the world of evildoers.”
—Arundhati Roy
Everyone speaks of peace; no one knows what peace is. We know at best a poisoned peace. No one has lived on an earth without weapons, without war and the threat of war on a large and small scale.
—Christina Thürmer-Rohr
In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and, ultimately, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
—Hannah Arendt
The struggle to maintain peace is immeasurably more difficult than any military operation.
—Anne O’Hare McCormick
The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.
—Solomon Short
We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.
—Mary Parker Follett
We categorize everyone. We send the old here, the young there. We ship adolescents off to war. We send everyone to prison every day: the children to school, the parents to the office or the factory, the musicians to concert halls in the evening.
—John Cage