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“We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.”
Source : "Our Generation Against Nuclear War". Book by Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos, 1983.
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“I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.”
Source : Quoted in James Charlton, The Military Quotation Book (1990)
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“Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.”
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“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
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“The journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. So we must never neglect any work of peace within our reach, however small.”
Source : "Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time" by Laurence J. Peter, (p. 508), 1977.
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“A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that.”
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“The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?”
Source : A. J. Muste's statement of 1941, as quoted in Howard Zinn "A People's History" (p. 416), 1980, and later quoted in Howard Zinn "The Twentieth Century: A People's History" (p. 159), May 9, 1984.
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“No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.”
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“Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.”
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“This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.”
