This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes." - Thomas Paine
"If the cause and end of war be justifiable, all the means that appear necessary to the end are justifiable also." - William Paley, Archdeacon of Saragossa
"War is never a solution - war is an aggravation." - Louis N. Parker, fully Louis Napoleon Parker
"The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies." - Lester Pearson, fully Lester Bowles "Mike" Pearson
"There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness." - Sam Peckinpah
"We should provide in peace what we need in war." - Publius Syrus
"War is, after all, the universal perversion. We are all tainted: if we cannot experience our perversion at first hand we spend our time reading war stories, the pornography of war; or seeing war films, the blue films of war; or titillating our senses with the imagination of great deeds, the masturbation of war." -
"No kingdom can go to war with empty pockets." - Leitch Ritchie
"War... is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State, and individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of their country, but as its defenders. Finally, each State can have for enemies only other States, and not men." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"War admits no excuses." - Quintus Curtius Rufus
"No international Eighteenth Amendment will get rid of war or the instruments of war until civilization finds a way for accomplishing what war has done in the past. Simply to prohibit war is not going to get rid of it. Wars must be anticipated and the causes got rid of by a readiness to accept peaceful means of settlement." - James T. Shotwell
"War. There is no solution for it. There is never a conqueror. the winner generates such hatred that he is ultimately defeated." - Michel Simon
"The greatest curse that can be entailed on mankind is a state of war. All the atrocious crimes committed in years of peace, all that is spent in peace by the secret corruptions, or by the thoughtless extravagance of nations, are mere trifles compared with the gigantic evils which stalk over this world in a state of war. God is forgotten in war; every principle of Christianity is trampled upon." - Sydney Smith
"There is no excuse for poverty in a society which can spend $80 billion a year on its war machine." - I. F. Stone, fully Isidor Feinstein Stone, born Isidor Feinstein
"If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. doctrines are the most fearful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man’s own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines." - William Graham Sumner
"There is no state of readiness for war; the notion calls for never-ending sacrifices." - William Graham Sumner
"The alternative to peace is not war. It is annihilation." - Raymond Gram Swing
"War mends but few, and spoils multitudes; it legitimates rapine and authorizes murder; and these crimes must be ministered to by their lesser relatives, by covetousness and anger and pride and revenge, and heats of blood, and wilder liberty, and all the evil that can be supposed to come from or run to such cursed causes of mischief." - Jeremy Taylor
"War is the unfolding of miscalculations." - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman
"Throughout history there has never been an evitable war. The greatest danger of war always lies in the widespread acceptance of its inevitability." - James Paul Warburg
"The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill, or, in other words, in learning what we do not know from what we do." - Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, sometimes called "The Iron Duke"
"War is fear cloaked in courage." - William C. Westmoreland
"Not from successful love alone, nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war; but as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, as gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, as softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air, as days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree, then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding and blissful halcyon days!" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"War never ends war." - Stephen Samuel Wise
"Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace." - Herman Wouk
"The object of war is peace." - Henry Merritt Wriston
"After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig." - Chinua Achebe, formally Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe
"In war and affairs of state, many things seem to be just and reasonable at first sight; yet nothing of the kind ought to be finally decided without pondering in a hundred different lights." - Babur NULL
"If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia." - Hans Albrecht Bethe
"The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man." - William Henry Beveridge
"Peace is more than simply the absence of aggression and war. Peace transcends the end of a conflict or a statement of policy. While we may force the outward appearance of peace upon a people or a nation, it is the underlying thinking that must change to create a true and lasting peace." - Gregg Braden
"To change the conditions that allow war, oppression, and mass suffering, we must change the thinking that has allowed the conditions to be present.”" - Gregg Braden
"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living." - Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
"We have too many men of science, and too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets. We know more about war than we know of peace, more about killing than we know about living." - Omar Bradley, fully Omar Nelson Bradley
"The ancient theory of the just war breaks down when victory is impossible, when the weapons are so undiscriminating as to destroy both sides." - Christian Century Editorial NULL
"In war, as in life, it is often necessary, when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"To secure peace is to prepare for war." - Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz
"War is a continuation of policy by the use of different means." - Carl von Clausewitz, fully Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, also Karl von Clausewitz
"Those very characteristics which are demanded by war – the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having a mind open to the receipt of novel, and perhaps threatening information – are the antitheses of those possessed by people attracted to the controls, and orderliness, of militarism." - Norman F. Dixon
"The occasions to which the concept of the just war can be rightly applied have become highly restricted. A war to “defend the victims of wanton aggression” where the demands of justice join the demands of order, is today the clearer case of a just war… The concept of a just war does not provide moral justification for initiating a war of incalculable consequences to end such oppression." - Angus Dun and Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. What man's mind can create, man's character can control." - Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
"All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means." - Chou En-Lai, also Zhou Enlai