You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. - Jeanette Rankin
Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel. - John Keats
War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. - Carl Von Clausewitz
What we know as goodness is not a static quality but arrives through a series of choices, some imperceptible, which are continually presented to us. – Susan Griffin
All forms of violence are quests for identity. – Marshall McLuhan
War was a rebirth of freedom. - Abraham Lincoln
Humans seem at home in war. They feel lost among the responsibilites of peace. In war they are told what to do, they accept that they have to 'get on with it'. In peace it seems uncertain what they have to do; they have to discover what the 'it' is to get on with. – Nicholas Mosley, 'Paradoxes of Peace'
There’s nothing romantic or satisfying about war. It is horrible and profoundly depressing. –George Marshall
Truth springs from argument amongst friends. - David Hume
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. - Alfred Adler
All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions. - William Butler Yeats
When we ingest the anodyne of war, we feel what those we strive to destroy feel, including the Islamic fundamentalists who are painted as alien, barbaric, and uncivilized. It is the same narcotic. -Chris Hedges, 'War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning'
Either war is obsolete or men are. - Buckminster Fuller
Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. – Glenn Gray, 'The Warriors; Reflecting on Men in Battle'
Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. - Colman McCarthy
Our loyalty to our community and our nation is therefore morally tolerable only if it includes values wider than those of the community. – Reinhold Niebuhr
Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing will fall flat in a week. - Will Rogers
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. – William Blake
If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed, sacred obligations which appear as objective realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion. - Norman O. Brown
Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude. - William James
The real war will never get in the books. – Walt Whitman in a 'New York Times' book review about the Civil War
In this world of frailty at the edge of a battlefield the line between ‘I’ and ‘not I’ has a dangerous tremor… With a simple shift in focus, the bounded self appears to blend with others. Dualities fade. And those things we take to be opposite can be seen on closer view to be mingled. – Susan Griffin, 'Chorus of Stones'
Habits rule the unreflecting herd. –William Wordsworth
It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming. Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be. -Wallace Stevens [from 'Prose statement on the poetry of war']
A problem cannot be solved on the same level of consciousness that created it. - Albert Einstein
Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light. - St. Paul