The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older — namely as old as propaganda lies.

 —Hannah Arendt

Lies written in ink cannot obscure a truth written in blood.

—Lu Xun

When we say “War is over if you want it,” we mean that if everyone demanded peace instead of another TV set, we’d have peace.

—John Lennon

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

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 Stuart Mill

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing, that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

—Agatha Christie

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

 —Jeannette Rankin

Either war is obsolete or men are.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.

—Gil Bailie

Alas, what is terrible is not the skeletons, but the fact that I am no longer terrified by them.

 —Anton Chekhov

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

—Winston Churchill