Quotations Collection

I collect quotes, and they've been quite handy in the sort of situations I get myself into.  So, sharing the wisdom... (I swear they're not all Nietzsche...)

"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs;  he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"The Earth hath skin, the skin hath diseases. One of these, is called man."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“What is it? Is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“There cannot be a God, for if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."

-Bertrand Russell

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."

-Bertrand Russell

"I believe that when I die I shall cease to exist, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting."

-Bertrand Russell

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one."

-George Bernard Shaw

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

-George Bernard Shaw

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

-George Bernard Shaw

"America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole."

-Bobcat Goldthwaite

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

-Douglas Adams

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."

-Isaac Asimov

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

-Gandhi

"The only completely consistent people are the dead."

-Aldous Huxley

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false one. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

-Bohr

"There is no absolute truth but consciousness"

-Bodhidharma

"What luck for rulers, that men do not think"

-Adolf Hitler

"Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademark, cause as much chaos and disruption as possible, but don't let them take you alive!"

-Sid Vicious

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilites; Truth isn't."

-Mark Twain

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

-Paul Dirac

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism."

-Albert Einstein

"I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man."

-Ernesto Che Guevara

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."

-Ernesto Che Guevara

"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves."

-Ernesto Che Guevara

"There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man."

-Ernesto Che Guevara

"Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud.  I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth.  I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace."

-Charles Sumner

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.  If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

-Albert Einstein

"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."

-Bertrand Russell

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."

-John F. Kennedy

"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?""

-Eve Merriam

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."

-David Friedman

"There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.

-James Morrow

"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.  Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.  We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."

-Omar Bradley

"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.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums."

-Arthur Koestler

"What a cruel thing is war:  to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world." -Robert E. Lee

"Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education.  Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization.  We must make our choice; we cannot have both."

-Abraham Flexner

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."

-John F. Kennedy

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." 

-Ernest Hemingway

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."

-Jeanette Rankin

"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers."

-José Narosky

"War would end if the dead could return."

-Stanley Baldwin

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

-Voltaire

"[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester.  It is not only the living who are killed in war." 

-Isaac Asimov

"The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst."

-Henry Fosdick

"All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.  In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace.  When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?"

-Benjamin Franklin

"The first casualty when war comes is truth."

-Hiram Johnson

"When war is declared, truth is the first casualty."

-Arthur Ponsonby

"Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself."

-Francis Meehan

"War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man."

-Napoleon Hill

"We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace."

-Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War.  He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind.  He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth."

-Mark Twain

"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."

-Bertrand Russell

"It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die.  It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate."

-George McGovern

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in." 

-George McGovern

"When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die."

-Jean-Paul Sartre

"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem.  It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."

-Albert Einstein

"You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time."

-Albert Einstein

"We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong."

-Henry Miller

"The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life.  The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies.  Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery."

-Clarence Darrow

"The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter."

-Reginald Wright Kauffman

"Are bombs the only way of setting fire to the spirit of a people?  Is the human will as inert as the past two world-wide wars would indicate?"

-Gregory Clark

"The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts."

-Omar Bradley

"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."

-Thomas Mann

"We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide."

-Havelock Ellis

"The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution."

-John F. Kennedy

"If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "no" to war.  For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses."

-Louis Lecoin

"War is fear cloaked in courage."

-William Westmoreland

"Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood."

-Gandhi

"I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we're subjected monthly.  Maybe that's why men declare war - because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis."

-Brett Butler

"We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."

-Harriet Tubman

"It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passions, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace."

-André Gide

"What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood."

-Aldous Huxley

"Man has no right to kill his brother.  It is no excuse that he does so in uniform:  he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

"To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man."

-Michael Servetus

"A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been."

-Victor Hugo

"Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war."

-Otto Von Bismark

"The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people."

-Gerome Gragni and James Rado

"War hath no fury like a noncombatant."

-Charles Edward Montague

"War is never a solution; it is an aggravation."

-Benjamin Disraeli

"Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?"

-Douglas Jerrold

"If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons."

-Pope John Paul II

"Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.  A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.  They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.  Now, what are they?  Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?  The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well."

-Henry David Thoreau

"There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it."

-Havelock Ellis

"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers."

-François Fénelon

"War should belong to the tragic past, to history:  it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future."

-Pope John Paul II

"Men were made for war.  Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life."

-Alice Thomas Ellis

"War is nothing less than a temporary repeal of the principles of virtue.  It is a system out of which almost all the virtues are excluded, and in which nearly all the vices are included."

-Robert Hall

"Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?"

-Holly Near

"The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service."

-Albert Einstein

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.  The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.  The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

-John Stewart Mill

"The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it."

-Louis Simpson

"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his."

-George Patton

"The expendability factor has increased by being transferred from the specialised, scarce and expensively trained military personnel to the amorphous civilian population.  American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars.  In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians."

-Colin Ward

"Organized slaughter, we realize, does not settle a dispute; it merely silences an argument."

-James Frederick Green

"I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man.  Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force?  Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?"

-Thomas Jefferson

"War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals."

-Charles Evans Hughes

"If we don't end war, war will end us."

-H.G. Wells

"There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried.  The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other.  I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves.  But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves.  Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature."

-Barbara Kingsolver

"War!  When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing.  When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages.  Who are the real savages?  Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?"

-Guy de Maupassant

"The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too.  It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks.  It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements.  But it fell, it fell."

-Hermann Hagedorn

"I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.  I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another."

-Harry Emerson Fosdick

"Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases... found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second."

-S.L.A. Marshall

"You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech."

-Franklin P. Jones, referring to the atomic bomb