War Quotes

War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington - not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict.

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.

A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone?

That isn't preventive war; that is war. 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.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.

The peace we seek and need means much more than mere absence of war. It means the acceptance of law, and the fostering of justice, in all the world.

You just can't have this kind of war. There aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.

This basic law of interdependence, so manifest in the commerce of peace, applies with thousand-fold intensity in the event of war. So we are persuaded by necessity and by belief that the strength of all free peoples lies in unity; their danger, in discord.

Abhorring war as a chosen way to balk the purposes of those who threaten us, we hold it to be the first task of statesmanship to develop the strength that will deter the forces of aggression and promote the conditions of peace.

The fruit of success in all these tasks would present the world with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war [on poverty].

This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need. The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice.

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new... That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

Even against the most powerful defense, an aggressor in possession of the effective minimum number of atomic bombs for a surprise attack could probably place a sufficient number of his bombs on the chosen targets to cause hideous damage.

I would be prepared to submit to the Congress of the United States... any such plan that would, first, encourage world-wide investigation into the most effective peacetime uses of fissionable material, and... second, begin to diminish the potential destructive power of the world's atomic stockpiles; third, allow all peoples of all nations to see that, in this enlightened age, the great Powers of the earth... are interested in human aspirations first rather than in building up the armaments of war; fourth, open up a new channel for peaceful discussion.

I have spent my life in the study of military strength as a deterrent to war, and in the character of military armaments necessary to win a war... We are rapidly getting to the point that no war can be won.

War implies a contest; when you get to the point that contest is no longer involved and the outlook comes close to destruction of the enemy and suicide for ourselves-an outlook that neither side can ignore - then arguments as to the exact amount of available strength as compared to somebody else's are no longer the vital issues.

When we get to the point, as we one day will, that both sides know that in any outbreak of general hostilities, regardless of the element of surprise, destruction will be both reciprocal and complete, possibly we will have sense enough to meet at the conference table with the understanding that the era of armaments has ended and the human race must conform its actions to this truth or die.

Wait a minute, boys. We're not going to be reconstructing the dollar. We're going to be grubbing for worms.

You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see then shoot yourself.