Connexions Quotations

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War and Militarism
Quotes


All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
- George Orwell

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
- George Orwell

The first casualty of war is truth.
- Rudyard Kipling

If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousands years ago, this world would be a madhouse.
- Erich Fromm

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
- Desmond Tutu

The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We’re living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare – warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
- Wendell Berry

’Merry Christmas. You no shoot, we no shoot.’
- German, British and French soldiers disobey their superiors and fraternize with ‘the enemy’, 1914

Militarism – which to society as a whole represents a completely absurd economic waste of enormous productive forces – and which for the working class means a lowering of its standard of living with the objective of enslaving it socially – is for the capitalist class economically the most alluring, irreplaceable kind of investment and politically and socially the best support for their class rule.
- Rosa Luxemburg

That is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose – especially their lives.
- Eugene Debs

To imply by the word “terrorism” that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of “terrorists” is misleading. The “legitimate” warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.
- Wendell Berry

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To learn more about War and Militarism, explore the Connexions Subject Index War page and the Militarism page.