Notable Peace and War Quotations
When we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness.
Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?
—Ariel Dorfman, Sept. 22, 2006, Chilean American writer and professor at Duke University (retrieved from The Washington Post).
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of the British invading us” but he will say to you “be silent; I see it, if you dont.”
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.
—Abraham Lincoln, Feb. 15, 1848, while a Congressional Representative, in a letter to William H. Herndon (retrieved from www.bartleby.com).
The rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. . . .
National Socialists . . . seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. . . . A group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat. . . .
Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.” . . .
German has remained the language of politics in crisis. And the principal lesson speaks of the fragility of democracy, the fatality of civic passivity or indifference; German history teaches us that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable.
—Fritz Stern, Nov. 14, 2004, accepting the Leo Baeck Medal (retrieved from www.lbi.org/fritzstern.html).
The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism.
—Adlai Stevenson, 1952 speech (retrieved from http://tucnak.fsv.cuni.cz).
The congressional inquiry into President Bush’s authorizing the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans without warrants has now been locked away behind closed-door briefings. But if the public Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week is any guide, the Senate and House intelligence committees can expect to get no help from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He avoided far more questions than he answered in Monday’s hearing. In one sense, Gonzales did a masterly job of defending Bush’s position, by never acknowledging what he knows that position to be: an extraordinary claim to unchecked executive power.
—David Cole (article in Salon, February 10, 2006).
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
—Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), investigating the National Security Agency, 1975 (quoted in The Village Voice, January 13, 2006).
“Look at those people on the ground. They look just like ants. Who cares if some of them stop moving?”
—“Harry Lime,” villain of The Third Man, looking down from the high point of a Ferris wheel while excusing trafficking in adulterated penicillin.
Red White Blue and Red
The sand runs red with dying Dead in desert heat Sheets of white Shield eyes from man who cannot have a child child who will not be a man Shield eyes of blue old within a boyish face wild with fear and pain Blue windows to a reeling brain that guides a bullet to his head And sand runs red |
“America ... has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart....
“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
“But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own....
“She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
“The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
—John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, speaking to the US House of Representatives on July 4, 1821 (retrieved from www.truthout.org).
“Sometimes I think we face a wilderness of compassion in this country. But when I think of the many voices that have tried ... to clamor for the works of mercy rather than the works of war, ... I feel a deep urge to be silent and listen to the cries of those most afflicted, – their cries are often hard to hear – but when we hear them, we’re called, all of us, to be like voices in the wilderness, raising their laments and finding ourselves motivated to build a better world.
—Kathy Kelly, Activist and three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, in a statement to the judge upon being sentenced to three months in federal prison for her School of the Americas protest, January 26, 2004 (retrieved from www.commondreams.org).
“The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature. But the Doctrines lately advanced strike at the root of all these provisions, and will deposit the peace of the Country in that Department which the Constitution distrusts as most ready without cause to renounce it. For if the opinion of the President not the facts & proofs themselves are to sway the judgment of Congress, in declaring war, and if the President in the recess of Congress create a foreign mission, appoint the minister, & negociate a War Treaty, without the possibility of a check even from the Senate, untill the measures present alternatives overruling the freedom of its judgment; if again a Treaty when made obliges the Legislature to declare war contrary to its judgment, and in pursuance of the same doctrine, a law declaring war, imposes a like moral obligation, to grant the requisite supplies until it be formally repealed with the consent of the President & Senate, it is evident that the people are cheated out of the best ingredients in their Government, the safeguards of peace which is the greatest of their blessings.”
—James Madison, 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson (retrieved from www.bartleby.com).
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize lecture, 1973 (retrieved from www.bartleby.com).
“Testimony of all ages forces us to admit that war is among the most dangerous enemies to liberty, and that the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches of Power.”
—James Madision, (1751-1836), U.S. president (retrieved from www.bartleby.com).
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. ... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (retrieved from www.bartleby.com).
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citzenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell radio and television address to the American people, Washington, D.C., January 17, 1961 (retrieved from www.bartleby.com).
“We must find new ways to speak for peace.... If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967 (retrieved from www.spiritofmaat.com).
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed — those who are cold and not clothed.”
—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April, 1953 (retrieved from www.bartleby.com).
“I’ve been out in the Middle East and it is explosive: it is the worst I’ve ever seen in over a dozen years I’ve been working in this area. ... Almost anything could touch it off. ... The attempts I’ve seen to install democracy in short periods of time where there is no history and no roots have failed. ... Like those generals who were far greater than I am, I don’t think that violence and war is the solution.”
—Marine General Anthony Zinni, retired, during an interview early in 2003 (retrieved from www.vaiw.org).
“All of us have heard this term ‘preventive war’ since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time ... I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.”
—President Dwight Eisenhower, upon being presented with plans to wage preventive war to disarm Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1953 (retrieved from www.crosbycpr.com).
“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”
—Lt. General Sir Stanley Maude, shortly after the occupation of Baghdad by British forces in 1917 (retrieved from www.zmag.org).
“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
—The late William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, during the Watergate scandal and the FBI COINTELPRO operations (retrieved from www.aclu-mass.org/general/StateofUnion.html).
“When we dig down through all the layers to the roots of the causes, we find three fundamental causes of social problems: ignorance, apathy, and greed. The ultimate remedy for social problems therefore must confront all three root causes. It does little good to just run down the street shouting ‘share the rent!’ or ‘stop war!’. Uttering a slogan does no good unless it arouses sympathy.”
—Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor, Progress Report (retrieved from www.progress.org/archive/fold21.htm).
“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. ...”
—Supreme Court’s case decision, Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866), ruling against Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of Habeus Corpus during the Civil War.
“I’m the commander – see, I don’t need to explain – I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
—G. H. W. Bush, as told to Bob Woodward in “Bush at War”
“Of course, the people don’t want war. ... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
—Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Reichsmarshall (quoted in Gilbert, G.M. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947, pp. 278-279; retrieved from www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm)
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1918, in an editorial he wrote for the “Kansas City Star” during World War I (retrieved from www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/quotes.htm under “Presidential Criticism”).
Last updated: May 14 2010