Antiwar Quotes - Page 25

• The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes.

  Renata Adler

  Movie, Art, People

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• For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.

  Ernie Pyle

  Peace, War, Black

  ERNIE PYLE (1944). “BRAVE MEN”

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• War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

  Smedley Butler

  War, Believe, People

  "War Is A Racket". Smedley Butler's speech in the U.S. (1933); later published as a book "War Is a Racket", www.businessinsider.com. 1935.

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• The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Peace, Freedom, War

  Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion) (1928)

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• If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  War, Long, Victory

  "All Men Are Mortal". Book by Simone de Beauvoir, 1946.

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• Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

  Francis Bacon

  Wise, Peace, Hurt

  'Essays' (1625) 'Of Cunning'

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• The truth is that the antiwar movement was powered by the working class. The students were the ones that got the media and so forth, but it was the soldiers on the ground who really energized the antiwar movement in the late Sixties.

  Bill Ayers

  Media, Class, Soldier

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

  Robert Hass

  Morning, War, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

  Robert Hass

  War, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

  John Adams

  Inspirational, Trust, Freedom

  'Notes for an Oration at Braintree' (Spring 1772)

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• The [Vietnam] war's gone on for three years. And we'd thought we'd ended it because we'd done exactly what we were told and what we told ourselves we'd had to do. We had a majority. We were against the war and this created a crisis for democracy and a crisis for the antiwar movement.

  Bill Ayers

  War, Years, Democracy

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• [T]he Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

  John Ehrlichman

  War, Lying, Hippie

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• I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

  Smedley Butler

  War, Believe, Fighting

  Major General Smedley Butler's speech, 1933.

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• America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

  John Quincy Adams

  Peace, War, America

  "Speech of July 4, 1821". John Quincy Adams " The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotation. Hugh Rawson and Margaret Miner. Oxford University Press, 2008.

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• No great dependence is to be placed on the eagerness of young soldiers for action...fighting is agreeable to those who are strangers to it.

  Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

  Peace, War, Fighting

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• A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

  Joseph Addison

  War, Stupid, Believe

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• The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

  Hannah Arendt

  Peace, War, Errors

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.70, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

  W. H. Auden

  Death, War, Men

  Shield of Achilles (1955) "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier"

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• A hospital alone shows what war is.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Peace, War, Hospitality

  Harold Bloom, Erich Maria Remarque (2008). “Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front”, p.70, Infobase Publishing

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• History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.

  Enoch Powell

  Witty, Peace, War

  "Freedom and reality".

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• War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.

  C. E. M. Joad

  War, Men, Position Of Power

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• The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Honesty, Integrity, War

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• The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

  John Foster Dulles

  Peace, War, Sacrifice

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• When are we left-wingers going to learn that we are losing the cultural and political battle with conservatives because we are fractured into narcissistic special-interest groups? Why should an antiwar protestor be so concerned about her dietary identity? The political opinions of vegetarians and meat-eaters are, after all, equally important. And what does it tell us about vegetarians that it would never occur to meat-eaters to carry a sign that reads "Pacifist Pork Chop Lover for Peace" or "Backyard Rib Barbecuer for International Nuclear Disarmament"?

  Sherman Alexie

  Political Opinions, Nuclear Disarmament, Unity

  "Lefties Need to Love, Love, Love the White Working Class". Article by Sherman Alexie, www.thestranger.com. April 17, 2003.

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• It was a failure of citizenship of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Thus, every U.S. citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis.

  Dahr Jamail

  War, Iraq, People

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