Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
—Gregory Bateson
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have.
—James Baldwin
Peace is only a hair's breadth away from war.
—Carl Hilty
For, as wolves and tigers gorge themselves with flesh and lick their gory chops, so do nations gorge themselves with human victims, not in detail, but in masses, by wholesale.
—Henry C. Wright
I find patriotism not only a refuge of scoundrels but of idiots and those who like to buy their thinking ready-made each morning in the vacuous newspapers. Every decade or so governments create wars and whip up a frenzy, so that we will not notice the shortcomings of our own side and will not question the assumptions of our society and demand more rational institutions and laws.
—Marge Piercy
Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.
—Norman Mailer
As America celebrates Memorial Day, we pay tribute to those who have given their lives in our nation's wars.
—John M. McHugh
My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.
—Ronald Reagan
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
—George Bernard Shaw
A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it.
—Jacques Yves Cousteau
Sports is like a war without the killing.
—Ted Turner
I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.
—Artemus Ward
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
—Plato