Sign of the Times: February 2012

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

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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
Albert Einstein

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

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 N. Bradley

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

The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.
George McGovern

I am tired and sick 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.
William Tecumseh Sherman

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
George Orwell

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

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams

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

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
Joan Baez

If we don't end war, war will end us.
H. G. Wells

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
Herodotus

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

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