A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
– Edward Abbey

   Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent.
– Issac Asimov

   The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
– Ambrose Bierce

   Every patriot believes his country better than any other country . . . In its active manifestation—it is fond of killing—patriotism would be well enough if it were simply defensive, but it is also aggressive . . . Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part . . . Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone.
– Ambrose Bierce

   War is the business of barbarians.
– Napoleon Bonaparte

   War is the health of the state.
– Randolph Bourne, The State

   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

   Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
– George W. Bush

   Our nation is somewhat sad, but we’re angry. There’s a certain level of blood lust, but we won’t let it drive our reaction. We’re steady, clear-eyed and patient, but pretty soon we’ll have to start displaying scalps.
– George W. Bush

   War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
– General Smedley Butler

   I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the country's most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

   I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

   Thus I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

   During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.
– Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler (former Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps), Common Sense, November 1935

   War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.
– Thomas Carlyle

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
– G. K. Chesterton

   War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the death of others on the altar of their greed.
– John Cory

   The lowest standards of ethics of which a right-thinking man can possibly conceive is taught to the common soldier whose trade is to shoot his fellow men. In youth he may have learned the command, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but the ruler takes the boy just as he enters manhood and teaches him that his highest duty is to shoot a bullet through his neighbor's heart — and this, unmoved by passion or feeling or hatred, and without the least regard to right or wrong, but simply because his ruler gives the word.
– Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil

   Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
– Albert Einstein (attributed)

   Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a 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 its money alone—it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
– Dwight Eisenhower, Speech (1953)

   We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

   May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

   I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

   War is delightful to those who have not experienced it.
– Erasmus

   The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying, cruelty—all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public acclaim. You cannot, when the war is proclaimed, pull a switch and turn the community from the moral code of peace to that of war and then, when the armistice is signed, pull another switch and reconnect the whole society with its old moral regulations again. Thousands of people of all ranks who have found a relish in the morals of war come back to you with these rudimentary instincts controlling their behavior while thousands of others, trapped in a sort of no man's land between these two moralities, come back to you poisoned by cynicism.
—John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching

   Never has there been a good war or a bad peace.
– Benjamin Franklin

   Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
– Benjamin Franklin

   If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.
– Frederick the Great

   The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.
– Senator James W. Fulbright

   Either war is obsolete or men are.
– R. Buckminster Fuller

   War remains the decisive human failure.
– John Kenneth Galbraith

   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 the holy name of liberty and democracy?
– Mahatma Gandhi

   Naturally, the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a 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. It works the same in every country.
– Hermann Goering

   There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance.
– Goethe

   The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives from the cradle to the grave. No less pathetic is it that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.
– Emma Goldman

   Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue. Almost nothing is spent on education, art, literature and science compared with the amount devoted to militarism in times of peace, while in times of war everything else is set at naught; all life stagnates, all effort is curtailed; the very sweat and blood of the masses are used to feed this insatiable monster--militarism. Under such circumstances, it must become more arrogant, more aggressive, more bloated with its own importance. If for no other reason, it is out of surplus energy that militarism must act to remain alive; therefore it will seek an enemy or create one artificially. In this civilized purpose and method, militarism is sustained by the state, protected by the laws of the land, is fostered by the home and the school, and glorified by public opinion. In other words, the function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.
– Emma Goldman

   I expect to pass through the world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness I can show to any creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it, for I shall not pass this way again.
– Stephen Grellet (1773-1855), Quaker missionary

   The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn't salute or play the game. And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around, and they've used up their credibility.
– David Halberstam (1934-2007), Pulitzer Prize-winning author

   In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk

   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 Hemmingway

   Old men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
– Herbert C. Hoover

   War is as much a punishment to the punisher as it is to the sufferer.
– Thomas Jefferson

   I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
– Thomas Jefferson

   When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
– Thomas Jefferson

   If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.
– Thomas Jefferson

   The first casualty when war comes is the truth.
– Sen. Hiram Johnson

   The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.
– Lyndon B Johnson

   The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.
– Frank Kent

   Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

   The chain reaction of evil--wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

   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

   It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
– General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951

   Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
– James Madison

   No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
– James Madison

   If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
– James Madison

   All men having power ought to be mistrusted.
– James Madison

   Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
– Groucho Marx

   War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.
– Senator John McCain

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

   The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
– H.L. Mencken

   Is a young man bound to serve his country in war? In addition to his legal duty there is perhaps also a moral duty, but it is very obscure. What is called his country is only its government and that government consists merely of professional politicians, a parasitical and anti-social class of men. They never sacrifice themselves for their country. They make all wars, but very few of them ever die in one. If it is the duty of a young man to serve his country under all circumstances then it is equally the duty of an enemy young man to serve his. Thus we come to a moral contradiction and absurdity so obvious that even clergymen and editorial writers sometimes notice it.
– H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

   In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
– 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 nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
– George Orwell

   That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true.
– Thomas Paine

   War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.
– Congressman Ron Paul

   The de-facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.
– Major Ralph Peters, US Military

   People do not make wars; governments do.
– Ronald Reagan

   A people free to choose will always choose peace.
– Ronald Reagan

   The working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are responsible for everything that takes place, the good things and the bad things. True enough, they suffer most from a war, but it is their apathy, craving for authority, etc., that is most responsible for making wars possible. It follows of necessity from this responsibility that the working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are capable of establishing lasting peace.
– Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

   All wars are fought for money.
– Socrates

   I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
– General William Tecumseh Sherman

   The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

   A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

   National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing the people.
– Senator John Taylor

   Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery.
– Leo Tolstoy, Christianity and Patriotism

   Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.
– Mark Twain

   All war is based on deception.
– Sun Tzu

   It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
– Voltaire

   Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities
– Voltaire

   Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.
– George Washington

   Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself?