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....December 3, 2:35 AM |
| Some Thoughts On War And Peace
By MICHAEL SCHENKLER This week, I offer a selection of quotations of well-known people, to make you scratch your head: If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy?” — Mohandas Gandhi
Either war is obsolete or men are. —R. Buckminster Fuller The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. — Thomas Jefferson The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry out, is not a patriot, but a traitor. — Mark Twain There never was a good war or a bad peace. —Benjamin Franklin When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
All we are saying is: give peace a chance. —John Lennon
One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We make war that we may live in peace. —Aristotle
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day. — Eugene Debs
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. — Ernest Hemingway You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist. —Indira Gandhi
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. —The Dalai Lama
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. —Sir Winston Churchill
In case you haven’t noticed, we… dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything. Piece of cake. — Kurt Vonnegut The purpose of all war is ultimately peace. —Saint Augustine
Let us pray in this hour that nothing can divide us, and that God will help us against the Devil! Almighty Lord, bless our fight! — Adolph Hitler to the SA in 1930
I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war. As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities. —Voltaire  I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it. —Dwight D. Eisenhowe The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” — Joseph Conrad When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die. —Jean-Paul Sartre If they turn on their radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace…We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.” — U.S. Brig. General William Looney, directed bombing of Iraq in the late 1990s The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk. —Eleanor Roosevelt
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. — Mark Twain
If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. —Moshe Dayan Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. 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 to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. —Abraham Lincoln
Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer be of concern to great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and waters and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.—John F. Kennedy It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government. — Thomas Paine
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds. — Samuel Adams The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. —George Orwell
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election. —
Peace is our gift to each other. — Elie Wiesel
The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life. — Adolph Hitler
Peace, like charity, begins at home. —Franklin D. Roosevelt Authoritarian government required to speak, is silent…Representative government required to speak, LIES with impunity. — Napoleon Bonaparte
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 are not clothed... —Dwight D. Eisenhower
Peace starts with a smile — Mother Teresa Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. —Issac Asimov Herein lies a riddle: How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic? —
The choice before us is chaos or community. —Martin Luther King, Jr. The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. —Omar Bradley
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.—Sir Winston Churchill |
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Michael Schenkler can be reached via this contact form. |
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