Source: Anti War Literary and Philosophical Selections
“To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war….”
Whatever sickening justification may be advanced.
David Peterson /Chicago, USA
Links to hundreds of writings against war:
Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: It is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms
George Ade: The dubious rights granted a people “liberated” through war
Aeschines: Following a policy of war after war; war, the destroyer of popular government
Aeschines: Peace does not feed laziness
Aeschylus: Ares, father of tears, mows the field of man
Aeschylus: The unpeopled land laments her youth
Aesop: The lies of lupine liberators
Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death
Mark Akenside: The hidden plan whence every treaty, every war began
Mark Akenside: Statesmanship versus war
Alciphron: Content with a life of peace. Evading conscription is best.
Mark Aldanov: War was the only subject she avoided
Richard Aldington: Selections on war
Richard Aldington: All the decay and dead of battlefields entered his blood and seemed to poison him
Richard Aldington: The Blood of the Young Men
Richard Aldington: The criminal cant and rant of war
Richard Aldington: How well the premeditated mass murder of war is organized
Richard Aldington: It is so important to know how to kill
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
Richard Aldington: Why so sentimental? Why all this fuss over a few million men killed and maimed?
Vittorio Alfieri: The infamous trade of soldier, the sole basis of all arbitrary authority
Grant Allen: War and blood money
James Lane Allen: Then white and heavenly Peace again. Eteocles and Polyneices In America
American writers on peace and against war
Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games
Ammianus Marcellinus: Empowering the military…with foreseeable results
Ammianus Marcellinus: War’s landscape: discolored with the hue of dark blood
Anacreon: Rather art and love than lamentable war
Hans Christian Andersen: Art, not arms, rules the world. War, an allegory
Sherwood Anderson: War destroys brotherhood
Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh
Antiphanes: War and personal destiny
Apollodorus: Why do you devote all your thought to injuring one another by making war?
Appian: Drawing the sword for mutual slaughter. The tears of fratricide.
Appian: War fueled by blood and gold, excuse for expenditure of one, expropriation of the other
Louis Aragon: Selections on war
Louis Aragon: Caravans of Peace
Louis Aragon: Children scattering flowers will some day scatter deadly flowers, grenades
Louis Aragon: The military: parasite and defender of parasitism
Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession
Louis Aragon: War and its gloomy procession of storm clouds, sacred rites, illusions and lies
Louis Aragon: War, signal for the coming massacre of the sacrificial herd
Aratus: Justice deserts earth with warning of wars and cruel bloodshed
Arturo Arias: There were bodies everywhere. They didn’t move. They were called corpses.
Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse
Aristotle: How tyrants use war
Aristotle: Leader not praiseworthy in training citizens for conquest and dominion
Aristotle: When they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing
Edwin Arnold: Heaven’s love descending in that loveliest word, PEACE!
Matthew Arnold: Man shall live in peace, as now in war
Matthew Arnold: New Age. Uphung the spear, unbent the bow.
Matthew Arnold: Tolstoy’s commandments of peace
Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors
W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain
Augustine: To make war on your neighbors, what else is this to be called than great robbery?
Aulus Gellius: Thievery as school for war
Alfred Austin: The White Pall of Peace
Marcel Aymé: A child’s view of war
Balzac: Mass executions: Has Europe ever ceased from wars?
Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly: The jackals of war
Henri Barbusse: Selections on war
Henri Barbusse: All battles spring from themselves and necessitate each other to infinity
Henri Barbussse: As long as the colors of uniforms cover the flesh of men
Henri Barbusse: The awful power of a dead man
Henri Barbusse: Blood-stained priest of the God of War
Henri Barbusse: Butchery as far as the eye can see
Henri Barbusse: Crows eddying round naked flesh with flapping banners and war-cries
Henri Barbusse: The enemy is militarism and no other
Henri Barbusse: Flags and swords, instruments of the cult of human sacrifice
Henri Barbusse: The goddess of slaughter, the world worn out by war
Henri Barbusse: I will wage war, even though I alone may survive
Henri Barbusse: Jesus on the battlefield
Henri Barbusse: Manual laborers of war glutting the cannon’s mouth with their flesh
Henri Barbusse: The mournful hearse of the army razes harshly
Henri Barbusse: Murder enters as invisibly as death itself. Industry multiplies its magic.
Henri Barbusse: The only cause of war is the slavery of those whose flesh wages it
Henri Barbusse: “Perhaps it is the last war of all”
Henri Barbusse: Sepulchral sculptor’s great sketch-model, the gate of hell
Henri Barbusse: Soldier’s glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war
Henri Barbusse: “That’s war. It’s not anything else.”
Henri Barbusse: There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war
Henri Barbusse: These murdered souls, covered with black veils; they are you and I
Henri Barbusse: Torture…agony…human sacrifices…
Henri Barbusse: War, as hideous morally as physically
Henri Barbusse: War befouls the country as it does faces and hearts
Henri Barbusse: “War must be killed; war itself”
Henri Barbusse: War which breeds war, whether by victory or defeat
Henri Barbusse: War’s loathsome horror and lunacy
Henri Barbusse: “We must have a new Ministry: a new public opinion: War.”
Henri Barbusse: The world has come to the end of its strength: it is vanquished by wars
Henri Barbusse: “You understand, I’m against all wars”
Maurice Baring: Unalterable horror, misery, pain and suffering which is caused by modern war
Joel Barlow: War after war his hungry soul require, each land lie reeking with its people’s slain
Thomas Lovell Beddoes: War’s harvest
Edward Bellamy: We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Stephen Vincent Benét: The dead march from the last to the next blind war
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Béranger: When from the miseries of war we wake…
Georges Bernanos: Wars like epidemics, with neither beginning nor end
Giuseppe Berto: Selections on war
Giuseppe Berto: Bombing produced cities of the dead
Giuseppe Berto: A fable: The war was going well, the war was going badly
Giuseppe Berto: No one truly survives war
Giuseppe Berto: One of the fruits of war, that people should feel so alone and desolate
Giuseppe Berto: Orphaned by the bombs
Giuseppe Berto: Then the war passed over our countryside
Giuseppe Berto: War destroys the soul even when it spares the body
Ambrose Bierce: Selections on war
Ambrose Bierce: Warlike America
Ambrose Bierce: The Coup de Grâce
Ambrose Bierce: Killed At Resaca
Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce: War as parricide
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: All labor’s dread of war’s mad waste and murder
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: I saw a dove fear-daunted
William Black: Military glory, the most mean, the most cruel and contemptible thing under the sun!
William Black: When Caesar’s legions turn on him
William Blake: Selections on war and peace
William Blake: Groaning among the happier dead
William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!
William Blake: O go not forth in Martyrdoms & Wars
William Blake: To peaceful arts shall envy bow
Alexander Blok: The kite, the mother and endless war
Robert Bly: War, writers and government money
Boethius: Provoking death’s destined day by waging unjust and cruel wars
Heinrich Böll: Every death in war is a murder – a murder for which someone is responsible
Heinrich Böll: I’m going to die soon and before the war is over. I shall never know peace again.
Wolfgang Borchert: It was war; stories from a primer
Wolfgang Borchert: Only one thing to do, say No!
George Borrow: Prisoners of war: misery on one side, disgrace on the other
James Boswell: Who profits by war?
Pierre Boulle: The long reach of war profiteers
Randolph Bourne: Selections on war
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
Randolph Bourne: War and the State
Randolph Bourne: Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it
Randolph Bourne: Conscience and Intelligence in War
Randolph Bourne: Twilight of Idols
Randolph Bourne: Below the Battle
William Lisle Bowles: Selections on war and peace
William Lisle Bowles: As War’s black trump pealed its terrific blast
William Lisle Bowles: The dread name of the hideous war-fiend shall perish
William Lisle Bowles: The Fiend of War, sated with slaughter
William Lisle Bowles: Grim-visaged War drowns with his trumpet’s blast a brother’s cries
William Lisle Bowles: Oh, when will the long tempestuous night of warfare and of woe be rolled away!
Henry Noel Brailsford: Waiting for the horrors of a war that was coming
Henry Noel Brailsford: Who is the happy warrior?
Georg Brandes: Selections on war
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
Georg Brandes: War, uninterrupted series of horrors, atrocities, and slaughter
Georg Brandes: The World at War
Georg Brandes: The Praise of War
Georg Brandes: Only officers and ammunition-makers wish war
Georg Brandes: Two million men held in readiness to exterminate each other
Georg Brandes: Wars waged by governments fronting for financial oligarchies
Georg Brandes: Abrupt about-face, the glorification of war
Georg Brandes: Giants of bloodshed; military staffs foster war
Georg Brandes: The future will look on war as the present looks on witchcraft, the Inquisition
Georg Brandes: War not fight for ideals but fight for concessions
Bertolt Brecht: Selections on war
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
Bertolt Brecht: I won’t let you spoil my war for me
Bertolt Brecht: In war the attacker always has an alibi
Bertolt Brecht: Maimed soldiers are anti-war demonstrators
Bertolt Brecht: One’s only got to make a war to become a millionaire. It’s amazing!
Bertolt Brecht: Picture-book generals more dangerous, less brave, than serial killers
Bertolt Brecht: The upper classes sacrifice for the soldiers
Bertolt Brecht: Wherein a holy war differs from other wars
British writers on peace and war
Louis Bromfield: NATO, Permanent War Panic and America’s Messiah Complex
Van Wyck Brooks: The truth about war that Mark Twain could only divulge after death
Charles Brockden Brown: Such is the spectacle exhibited in every field of battle
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul
Robert Browning: Selections on peace and war
Robert Browning: The devil’s doctrine, the paraded shame of war
Robert Browning: Far and wide the victims of our warfare strew the plain
Robert Browning: Peace, in whom depths of wealth lie
Robert Browning: Peace rises within them ever more and more
Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North
William Cullen Bryant: Christmas 1875
Robert Buchanan: The moon gleamed on the dreadful drifts of dead
Edward Bulwer Lytton: The sword, consecrating homicide and massacre with a hollow name
Robert Burns: I hate murder by flood or field
Robert Burns: Peace, thy olive wand extend and bid wild War his ravage end
Robert Burns: Wars, the plagues of human life
Samuel Butler: Religion of war
Samuel Butler: Valor in modern warfare
Byron: The age of beauty will succeed the sport of war
Byron: All ills past, present and to come yield to the true portrait of one battle-field
Byron: Blasted below the hot breath of war
Byron: The drying up a single tear has more of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.
Byron: Gore and glory seen in hell alone
Byron: The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away
Byron: I loathe all war and warriors
Byron: Just ponder what a pious pastime war is
Byron: Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet
Byron: The time is past when swords subdued
Byron: War, banquet for wolf and worm
Byron: War cuts up not only branch, but root
Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought – and that was death
Byron: War feeds the vultures, wolves and worms
Byron: War returns on its perpetrator
Byron: War’s a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art
Callimachus: Nurse peace, that he who sows may also reap
Thomas Campbell: Selections on peace and war
Thomas Campbell: Maddening strife and blood-stain’d fields to come
Thomas Campbell: Men will weep for him when many a guilty martial fame is dim
Thomas Campbell: Sending whirlwind warrants forth to rouse the slumbering fiends of war
Thomas Campbell: Shall War’s polluted banner ne’er be furl’d?
Thomas Campbell: The snow shall be their winding-sheet, every turf a soldier’s sepulchre
Thomas Campion: Raving war wastes our empty fields
Thomas Campion: Then bloody swords and armour should not be
Thomas Campion: Upright man needs neither towers nor armour
Albert Camus: Where war lives. The reign of beasts has begun.
Karel Čapek: The War with the Newts
Ernesto Cardenal: They speak of peace and secretly prepare for war
Thomas Carew: Lust for gold fills the world with tumult, blood, and war
Thomas Carew: They’ll hang their arms upon the olive bough
Thomas Carlyle: The works of peace versus battles and war-tumults
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man
Cervantes: Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony
Chateaubriand: Would-be master of the world who knew only how to destroy
Geoffrey Chaucer: The city to the soldier’s rage resigned; successless wars and poverty behind
Anton Chekhov: You can’t remember a single year without war
Victor Cherbuliez and Erich Fromm: Wars are outbursts of destructiveness and paranoid suspicion
Charles Chesnutt: Justice, Peace – the seed and the flower of civilisation
G.K. Chesterton: In modern war defeat is complete defeat
Cicero: All wars, undertaken without a proper motive, are unjust
Cicero: Military commands, phantom of glory and the ruin of one’s own country and personal downfall
Claudian: Hell’s numberless monsters plot war
Clement of Alexandria: Gods of war
Clement of Alexandria: Let us gird ourselves with the armour of peace
Arthur Hugh Clough: For an impalpable odour of honour armies shall bleed
Arthur Hugh Clough: Ye vulgar dreamers about peace
Humphrey Cobb: Selections on war
Humphrey Cobb: Generals are reassured by the smell of the dead
Humphrey Cobb: Hallucination of fantastic butchery; too much for one man to bear
Humphrey Cobb: The paths of glory lead but to the rats
Humphrey Cobb: Reworking the sixth commandment for war; thou shalt not commit individual murder
Humphrey Cobb: War never settled anything except who was the strongest
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selections on peace and war
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: And war still violates the unfinished works of peace
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The demon War and its attendants, maniac Suicide and giant Murder
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Fire, Famine, And Slaughter: A War Eclogue
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: From all sides rush the thirsty brood of War!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War and all its dread vicissitudes pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War is a murderous fiend, by fiends adored
Joseph Conrad: Selections on war
Joseph Conrad: Firing into a continent, a touch of insanity in the proceeding
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war
Joseph Conrad: With earth soaked in blood, all men seek some formula of peace
James Fenimore Cooper: Is there a star where war and bloodshed aren’t known?
James Fenimore Cooper: War’s victory not worth the sacrifice of human life
Michel Corday: Selections from The Paris Front
Michel Corday: Blood! Blood! But there is still not enough.
Michel Corday: The everlasting glorification of murder
Michel Corday: War, the most brutal heritage of the past
Michel Corday: In war fathers bury their sons
Michel Corday: War sentiment is general dementia, barbarous and neolithic
Michel Corday: Millions of men killed to cure a single hypochondriac
Michel Corday: War – hell let loose, butchery, a return to barbarism
Michel Corday: War is irreparable loss for the earth and the human race
Michel Corday: The hideous futility of war in itself
Michel Corday: Future description of these horrors ought to make any return of war impossible
Michel Corday: Striking against war
Michel Corday: The Truth is the chief victim of war
Michel Corday: Glorification of slaughter is the beginning of future armaments
Michel Corday: The plague that comes in war’s train\
Joseph Cottle: Selections on war
Joseph Cottle: If on the slaughter’d field some mind humane…
Joseph Cottle: Know you their crimes on whom you warfare wage?
Joseph Cottle: Plant the seeds of universal peace
Joseph Cottle: Torn from their cots to wield the murderer’s blade
Joseph Cottle: Warn mankind to shun the hostile spear
Joseph Cottle: War’s noxious breath fills earth with discord, dread, and death
Abraham Cowley: Like the peace, but think it comes too late
Abraham Cowley: Only peace breeds scarcity in Hell
Abraham Cowley: To give peace and then the rules of peace
Malcolm Cowley: By day there are only the dead
William Cowper: Selections on peace and war
William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man: Homo homini lupus
William Cowper: In every heart are sown the sparks that kindle fiery war
William Cowper: Never shall you hear the voice of war again
William Cowper: Peace, both the duty and the prize
William Cowper: They trust in navies and armies
William Cowper: Universal soldiership has stabbed the heart of man
Stephen Crane: An Episode of War
Stephen Crane: There was crimson clash of war
Richard Crashaw: In Hell’s palaces
Rubén Darío: You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes
Alphonse Daudet: Revenge and war
William Davenant : War, the sport of kings, increases the number of dead
John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again
Richard Harding Davis: Destruction versus civilization, soldiers and engineers
Thomas Day: Wages abhorred war with humankind
John William De Forest: Uncivil war
Daniel Defoe: Mammon and Mars, twin deities
Demosthenes: When war comes home, the fatal weaknesses of states are revealed
Charles Dickens: Waging war to perpetuate slavery
Emily Dickinson: I many times thought Peace had come
Dio Cassius: Weeping and lamenting the fratricide of war
Dio Chystostom: Greed leads to internal strife and foreign wars
Dio Chrystostom: On the fate of states educated only for war
Diodorus Siculus: Alexander’s first encounter with military glory
Diodorus Siculus: History is more than the recording of wars
Diogenes Laertius: Steel and eloquence
Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Scorn rapine and violence and the profits accruing from war
Alfred Döblin: The law and the police are at the service of the war state and its slavery
Alfred Döblin: The old grim cry for war
Alfred Döblin: War is not ineluctable fate
Alfred Döblin: We march to war, Death folds his cloak singing: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.
John Donne: The horror and ghastliness of war
John Donne: War and misery are one thing
John Dos Passos: Selection on war
John Dos Passos: Meat for guns. Shot for saying the war was wrong.
John Dos Passos: The miserable dullness of industrialized slaughter
John Dos Passos: Not wake up till the war was over and you could be a human being again
John Dos Passos: They were going to kill everybody who spoke that language
John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers
John Dos Passos on Randolph Bourne: War is the health of the state
John Dos Passos: What was the good of stopping the war if the armies continued?
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Selections on war
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The desire to rule mankind as slaves leads West to colossal, final war
1862: Dostoevsky on the new world order
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The abysmal cunning of war
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Holocaustal weapons of future wars
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Holy blood was shed, regular wars sprang up
Michael Drayton: All your banks with peace preserved be
Theodore Dreiser: The logic of military victory, an apologue
Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket
Maurice Druon: A contempt for all things military
Maurice Druon: The dual prerogatives of minting coins and waging wars
John Dryden: All your care is to provide the horrid pomp of war
John Dryden: In peace the thoughts of war he could remove
John Dryden and Horace: Happy is he who trumpets summon not to war
John Dryden and Lucretius: Venus and Mars: Lull the world in universal peace
Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas: Breaking oaths of peace, cover the fields with bloody carcasses
W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace
Georges Duhamel: Selections on war
Georges Duhamel: The demon of war had imprisoned us under his knee
Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket
Georges Duhamel: Mosaic of pain stained with mud and blood, the colours of war
Georges Duhamel: No end to war without moral reeducation
Georges Duhamel: No man desires war…but if there’s money to be made…
Georges Duhamel: The possession of the world is not decided by guns. It is the noble work of peace.
Georges Duhamel: The stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men
Georges Duhamel: The Third Symphony, a slender bridge across the abyss
Georges Duhamel: War and civilization
Georges Duhamel: Who has taught children of man that war brings happiness?
Georges Duhamel: World where now there are more graveyards than villages
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts
Finley Peter Dunne: A great nation at war (in the vernacular)
Maurice Duplay: Colloquy on science and war
Maurice Duplay: Imperative to uproot the passion of war
Marguerite Duras: The civilizing mission
Jean Dutourd: The horrors of war
Edward Dyer: So that of war the very name may not be heard again
Eça de Queiroz: The English in Egypt, a case study
Havelock Ellis: War, a relapse from civilisation into barbarism, if not savagery
Paul Éluard: True law of men despite the misery and war
Epictetus: I and mine, the cause of wars
Erasmus: The Complaint of Peace
Erckmann-Chatrian: In a century the war gods will be recognized as barbarians
Erckmann-Chatrian: In war belligerents conspire against their own citizens
Euripides: The crown of War, the crown of Woe
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Today, war means the annihilation of the human race itself
William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
William Faulkner: To militarists, all civilians, even their own, are alien intruders
George Farquhar: What induced you to turn soldier?
Konstantin Fedin: Is there anyone who doesn’t want this war to be the last one on earth?
Fénelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man
Lion Feuchtwanger: Selections on war
Lion Feuchtwanger: The demand for perpetual peace must be raised again and again
Lion Feuchtwanger: The future national state: A military power beyond conception
Lion Feuchtwanger: The privilege, the courage of fighting for peace
Lion Feuchtwanger: Service at the front gave him a burning hatred for militarism
Lion Feuchtwanger: There is no greater crime than an unnecessary war
Lion Feuchtwanger: War to make the world safe for democracy
Johann Gottlieb Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace
Eugene Field and Thorne Smith: Bacchus disables Mars
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
F. Scott Fitzgerald: War comes to Princeton
Florus: Scattering the flames of war over the whole world
Florus: World war, something worse than war
E.M. Forster: The Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer.
E.M. Forster: Wars spurred on by persistent talk of war, amplified by the gutter press
Anatole France: Selections on war
Anatole France: Attack the monster that devours our race; make war on war, a war to the death
Anatole France: Barracks are a hideous invention of modern times
Anatole France: Country living under shadow of war is easy to govern
Anatole France: Education and War
Anatole France: Emerging painfully from primitive barbarism, war
Anatole France: The ethics of war
Anatole France: Financiers only wanted colonial wars and the people did not want any wars at all
Anatole France: “He left us impoverished and depopulated, but he gave us glory”
Anatole France: How the U.S. Congress deliberates on wars
Anatole France: In civilised nations the glory of massacre is the greatest glory known
Anatole France: Letter to an advocate of “peace with victory”
Anatole France: Military service the most terrible pest of civilised nations
Anatole France: Modern Romans, the Americanization of the world
Anatole France: No one has right to kill, just man will refuse to draw his number for war
Anatole France: Nobel Prize speech
Anatole France: Only two ways out of militarism – war and bankruptcy
Anatole France: Restoring order by means of theft, rape, pillage, murder and incendiarism
Anatole France: To avert the danger of peace breaking out…
Anatole France: The tutelary gods of world war
Anatole France: Wait till the warriors you make gods of swallow you all up
Anatole France: War, burlesque masquerade in which fatuous patriots sing stupid dithyrambs
Anatole France: War debases man beneath the level of ferocious beasts
Anatole France: War is the last redoubt of oligarchy, plutocracy
Anatole France: Wars fought over territorial acquisition, commercial rivalries
Anatole France: Whether civil or foreign, war is execrable
Anatole France: Why should not humanity abolish the law of murder?
Anatole France on Victor Hugo: People to substitute justice and peace for war and bloodshed
Anatole France on Émile Zola, military terrorism and world peace
Anatole France and Michel Corday: The press fans the flames of war’s blast furnace
Anatole France and Michel Corday: Threat of annihilation in gigantic Armageddon
Anatole France and Michel Corday: War is a crime, for which victory brings no atonement
Ivan Franko: Even the dove has the blood of men on its snowy white wings
Harold Frederic: War inflicts stifling political conformity
French writers on war and peace
Henry Blake Fuller: Killed and wounded on the fields of hate
Margaret Fuller: America, with no prouder emblem than the Dove
Thomas Fuller: As though there were not enough men-murdering engines
Thomas Fuller: When all the world might smile in perfect peace
John Galsworthy: Selections on war
John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare
John Galsworthy: Achieving perpetual peace by securing the annihilation of our common enemies
John Galsworthy: Friend becomes foe with war psychosis
John Galsworthy: Grandiloquent phrases are the very munitions of war
John Galsworthy: The monstrous injustice of conflating chauvinism with common drunkenness
John Galsworthy: On the drawbacks of uttering pro-war cant
John Galsworthy: On the embarrassing consequences of bellicose pontification
John Galsworthy: Only a helpless or wicked God would allow the slaughter of millions
John Galsworthy: The procreative demands of war
John Galsworthy: The pure essence of humanitarian warfare sentiments
John Galsworthy: War moves mankind towards the manly and unforgiving vigour of the tiger and the rat
John Galsworthy: “The war! The cursed war!”
John Galsworthy: War, where Christ is daily crucified a million times over
Rasul Gamzatov: For women war is never over
Gabriel García Márquez: Five wars and seventeen military coups
Hamlin Garland: Cog in a vast machine for killing men
David Garnett: Criminal to welcome war
David Garnett: War is the worst of the epidemic diseases which afflict mankind
John Gay: Parallel lives. Highwaymen and soldiers.
Stefan George: Monsters of lead and iron, tubes and rods escape their maker’s hand and rage unruly
German writers on peace and war
C. Virgil Gheorghiu: Armies composed of mercenaries fighting for the consolidation of robot society
C. Virgil Gheorghiu: Third World War, the first true world war in history
André Gide: Transformation of a war supporter
Jean Giono: Led to the slaughterhouse
Jean Giono: Rats and worms were the only living things
Jean Giono: War, nourishment and dismemberment
Jean Giono: War! Who’s the madman in charge of all this? Who’s the madman who gives the orders?
George Gissing: Selections on war
George Gissing: The imposition of military servitude
George Gissing: Lord of Slaughter commands curse of universal soldiering
George Gissing: War turns science into enemy of man
George Gissing: When the next great war comes, newspapers will be the chief cause of it
Ellen Glasgow: Selections on war
Ellen Glasgow: The Altar of the War God
Ellen Glasgow: His vision of the future only an endless warfare and a wasted land
Ellen Glasgow: The Reign of the Brute
Ellen Glasgow: “That killed how many? how many?”
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Ferdynand Goetel: Hands off our home, you tracking murderers! Hands off our brains and hearts!
Ferdynand Goetel: Men ripped up by the Moloch of war
Goethe: “O wisdom, thou speakest as a dove!”
Goethe: Withdraw hands from your swords
Nikolai Gogol: The dove not seeing the hawk. War in the Ukraine
Oliver Goldsmith: Selections on war
Oliver Goldsmith on war: Hundreds of thousands killed without consequence
Oliver Goldsmith: I am an enemy to nothing in this good world but war
Oliver Goldsmith: War and its servile press
Maxim Gorky: Selections on war
Maxim Gorky on Romain Rolland, war and humanism
Maxim Gorky: The fatal consequences of ignoring military protocol
Maxim Gorky: Generals and substitutes for monkeys
Maxim Gorky: Henri Barbusse and the mass of lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, dirt and blood called war
Maxim Gorky: Military museum; soaking the dirt and dust of the earth with copious blood
Maxim Gorky: Military Tower of Babel
Maxim Gorky: Only time to train cannon fodder, not soldiers
Maxim Gorky: Perfidious Albion at war
Maxim Gorky: “That’s what war is for – to seize foreign land or depopulate one’s own”
Maxim Gorky: The true motives of war
Maxim Gorky: War and Civilization
Maxim Gorky: War, cunning in its stupidity
Maxim Gorky: War permits destruction of every kind: losing limbs fighting for our country
Maxim Gorky: What in war is honorable, in peacetime is criminal
Maxim Gorky: What we needed was a successful war – with anybody at all
Maxim Gorky: When “cause of freedom for man” means money for armaments
Maxim Gorky: With arming of vast hordes of people, what can I get out of the war?
Maxim Gorky: World war and racial conflict on an obscure, infinitesimal planet
Edmund Gosse: War and the brutalities of the real thing
Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism
Robert Graves: Selections on war
Robert Graves: Accommodations for a million men killed in war
Robert Graves: A certain cure for lust of blood
Robert Graves: Even its opponents don’t survive war
Robert Graves: The grim arithmetic of war
Robert Graves: Men at arms and men of letters, the birth of English pacifism in the First World War
Robert Graves: Military madness degenerating into savagery
Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next
Robert Graves: War follows its victims back home
Robert Graves: War should be a sport for men above forty-five only
Robert Graves: War’s path of death, decay and decomposition
Robert Graves: War’s ultimate victors, the rats
Robert Graves: When even war’s gallows humor fails
Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war
Greek and Roman writers on war and peace
Graham Greene: He carried the war in his heart, infecting everything
Graham Greene: A hundred English Guernicas
Graham Greene: Letter On NATO Threat To Cuba
Graham Greene: None of us can hate any more – or love. You have to feel something to stop a war.
Robert Greene: Then the stormy threats of wars shall cease
Fulke Greville: The shames of peace are the pride of war
Nordahl Grieg: War is contempt for life
Jorge Guillén: The monsters have passed over
Nicolás Guillén: Come, dove, come tell me the tale of your woe
Pentti Haanpää: War suits only such people as want to die
Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified
Thomas Hardy: The Man He Killed
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
Charles Yale Harrison: Selections on war
Charles Yale Harrison: Bombardment, maniacal congealed hatred
Charles Yale Harrison: This is called an artillery duel
Charles Yale Harrison: War and really murdering someone
Charles Yale Harrison: War’s snarling, savage beasts
Charles Yale Harrison: War’s whispered reminder, you must come back to my howling madness
Charles Yale Harrison: We have learned who our enemies are
Jaroslav Hašek: Bathe in the blood of the enemy and slaughter them all as Herod did the babies
Jaroslav Hašek: Systematized, systematic system for writing of anticipatory war glories
Gerhart Hauptmann: American politics and warships
Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium
William Hazlitt: Selections on war
William Hazlitt: And this is patriotism. Practitioners of eternal war.
William Hazlitt: Difference between a war-expenditure and what ought to be a peace-establishment
William Hazlitt: Effects of war and taxes
William Hazlitt: High-priests of Moloch foam at the mouth at the name of peace
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
William Hazlitt: War is in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals
Ernest Hemingway: Selections on war
Ernest Hemingway: All armies are the same
Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war
Ernest Hemingway: “Down with the officers. Viva la Pace!”
Ernest Hemingway: “If everybody would not attack the war would be over”
Ernest Hemingway: “It doesn’t finish. There is no finish to a war.”
Ernest Hemingway: Nothing sacred about war’s stockyards
Ernest Hemingway: Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever.
Ernest Hemingway: There are people who would make war, there are other people who would not make war
Ernest Hemingway: Who wins wars?
O. Henry: The ethics of justifiable slaughter
George Herbert: Make war to cease
Johann Gottfried Herder: Hardly dare name or write the terrible word “war”
José-Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring
Miguel Hernández: Wretched Wars
Herodian: Accommodating the military, selling an empire
Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace
Robert Herrick: The Olive Branch
Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace
Alexander Herzen: Selections on the military and war
Alexander Herzen: As soon as a boy can walk, he is given a toy sword to train him to murder
Alexander Herzen: Barracks, the most inhuman condition in which men live. An exhibition of generals.
Alexander Herzen: Blood replaced by tears, the field of battle by forgotten tombs
Alexander Herzen: Chthonic passions, heathen patriotism fuel war
Alexander Herzen: Despotism means military discipline, empires mean war
Alexander Herzen: The frenzied anxiety, the exhausted satiety that lead to war
Alexander Herzen: Inhumanity of army discipline, flunky of a crowned soldier
Alexander Herzen: Middle class idyll impossible with half a million bayonets clamoring for “work”
Alexander Herzen: War and “international law”
Alexander Herzen: War, duel between nations; duel, war between individuals
Alexander Herzen: What the military calls work
Hesiod: Lamentable works of Ares lead to dank house of Hades
Maurice Hewlett: In the Trenches
Maurice Hewlett: Who prayeth peace?
Stefan Heym: Sure it’s a vicious circle, it’s war
Stefan Heym: The whole scene was immersed in the silence of absolute death
Stefan Heym: The world market…making new wars
Nazim Hikmet: Sad kind of freedom, free to be an American air base
James Hogg: Few such monsters can mankind endure: The fields are heaped with dead and dying.
James Hogg: Millions have bled that sycophants may rule
Ludvig Holberg: Military modesty and candor
Friedrich Hölderlin: Celebration of Peace
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Not so enamored of the drum and trumpet
Homer: The great gods are never pleased with violent deeds
Thomas Hood: As gentle as sweet heaven’s dew beside the red and horrid drops of war
Thomas Hood: Freelance soldiering
A. D. Hope: Inscription for a War
Gerard Manley Hopkins: What pure peace allows alarms of wars?
Horace: Let there be a limit to warfare
Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870
William Dean Howells: Selections on war
William Dean Howells: If we have war, every good cause will be set back
William Dean Howells to Henry James: The most stupid and causeless war
William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War
William Dean Howells: On Mark Twain and war
William Dean Howells to Mark Twain: War for humanity turned into war for coal-stations
William Dean Howells: Warmongers should tremble when they remember that God is just
William Dean Howells: Wilson’s Mexican war, wickeder than that of 1846
Langston Hughes: A mighty army serving human kind, not an army geared to kill
Victor Hugo: Selections on war
Victor Hugo: The black eagle waits with claws outspread
Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats
Victor Hugo: War, made by humanity against humanity, despite humanity
Victor Hugo: Glorious war does not exist; peace, that sublime, universal desire
Victor Hugo: Brute war, dire birth of hellish race
Victor Hugo: International Peace Congress 1851
Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen
Leigh Hunt: The devilish drouth of the cannon’s ever-gaping mouth
Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen
Aldous Huxley: Selections on war
Aldous Huxley: Absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by war
Aldous Huxley: The first of the political causes of war is war itself
Aldous Huxley: How are we to get rid of war when we celebrate militarists?
Aldous Huxley: Imposition of permanent military servitude upon the masses
Aldous Huxley: Manufacturing of arms, an intrinsically abominable practice
Aldous Huxley: Nuclear weapons, establishing world domination for one’s gang
Aldous Huxley: One cannot be ruler of militaristic society without being militarist oneself
Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war
Aldous Huxley: Science, technology harnessed to the chariot of war
Aldous Huxley: Scientific workers must take action against war
Aldous Huxley: Shifting people’s attention in world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit
Aldous Huxley: War is mass murder organized in cold blood
Aldous Huxley: War is not a law of nature, nor even of human nature
Aldous Huxley: War is now the affair of every man, woman and child in the community
Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”
Irish writers on peace and war
Washington Irving: The laudable spirit of military emulation. Soldiers, poor animals
Washington Irving: Most pacific nation in the world? Rather the most warlike
Washington Irving: The renown not purchased by deeds of violence and blood
Isocrates: Addicted to war, lusting after imperial power
Isocrates: War zealots plunge state into manifold disasters
Avetik Issahakian: Eternal fabricators of war, erecting pyramids with a myriad skulls
Panaït Istrati: Warmakers and toadeaters
Italian writers on war and militarism
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: The word pax, pax, pax
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
William James: The Philippine Tangle
Randall Jarrell: In bombers named for girls, we burned the cities we had learned about in school
Robinson Jeffers: Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind
Soame Jenyns: One good-natured act more praises gain than armies overthrown, and thousands slain
Soame Jenyns: The soldier’s scarlet glowing from afar shows his bloody occupation’s war
Jerome: We must seek peace if we are to avoid wars
Samuel Johnson: I to nobler themes aspire
Samuel Johnson: Reason frowns on War’s unequal game
Samuel Johnson: War is the extremity of evil
Mór Jókai: In the soldier’s march to glory each step is a human corpse
Mór Jókai: War’s patriotic pelf: a slaughtered army tells no tales
Josephus: Admonition against war
Joseph Joubert on war: All victors will be defeated
Attila József: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win
Julian: Reforming the evils that war has caused
Justin: There would then assuredly be fewer wars in all ages and countries
Juvenal: Mighty warriors and their tombs are circumscribed by Fate
Juvenal: The spoils of war and the price thereof
Juvenal: War and violence, baser than the beasts
Juvenal: Weigh the greatest military commanders in the balance
Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace
Georgi Karaslavov: War’s fratricide, how commonplace and yet how terrible
Frigyes Karinthy: Lost his mind on the battlefield, thought he knew what he was fighting for
Frigyes Karinthy: Started war of self-defense by attacking neighbor
Nikos Kazantzakis: Francis of Assisi
Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
John Keats: The fierce intoxicating tones of trumpets, drums and cannon
Joseph Kessel: In my family, war is in the blood…the blood of others
Joseph Kessel: The monstrous ululation of an air-raid siren
Joseph Kessel: War’s ultimate fratricide, killed for not killing
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Charles Kingsley: Empire, a system of world-wide robbery, and church
Charles Kingsley: Tyrannising it luxuriously over all nations, she had sat upon the mystic beast
Hans Hellmut Kirst: Goose-Stepping for NATO
Vladimir Korolenko: Final judgment
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky: Man the despoiler, man the slayer
Karl Kraus: Aphorisms and obloquies on war
Karl Kraus: This is world war. This is my manifesto to mankind.
Karl Kraus: The evolution of humanitarian bombing
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind
Karl Kraus: War renders unto Caesar that which is God’s
Karl Kraus: In war, business is business
Karl Kraus: Wire dispatches are instruments of war
Karl Kraus: The vampire generation; prayer in wartime
Alexander Kuprin: Selections on war
Alexander Kuprin: Deciphering the military metaphysic
Alexander Kuprin: The human race has had its childhood – a time of incessant and bloody war
Alexander Kuprin: Mounds and mountains of corpses under which moan the dying
La Bruyère on the lust for war
La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?
José-André Lacour: War’s sanguinary peacock
Jacques de Lacretelle: War’s atavistic brigands
Lactantius: Duties relating to warfare are accommodated neither to justice nor to true virtue
Lactantius: Justice had no other reason for leaving the earth than the shedding of human blood
Lactantius: Sacrificing to the gods of war
Lactantius: War, object of execration, and its domestic analogue
Pär Lagerkvist: If such a thing as war can end
Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Selma Lagerlöf: The mark of death was on them all
Lamartine: The republic of peace
Charles Lamb: More-wasting War, insatiable of blood
Wilhelm Lamszus: The Human Slaughter-House
Walter Savage Landor: Some stopped revenge athirst for slaughter
Sidney Lanier: Selections on war
Sidney Lanier: Blood-red flower of war, whose odors strangle a people, whose roots are in hell
Sidney Lanier: Dialogue on the war-flower
Sidney Lanier: War by other means
Sidney Lanier: The wind blew all the vanes in the country in one way – toward war
D. H. Lawrence: Selections on war
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil
D.H. Lawrence: In 1915 the world ended with the slaughter-machine of human devilishness
D.H. Lawrence: The price to pay at home for terrible, terrible war
D.H. Lawrence: War adds horror to horror, becomes horrible piratic affair, dirty sort of freebooting
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Stephen Leacock: In The Good Time After The War
Stephen Leacock: The war mania of middle age and embonpoint
Marie Lenéru: War is not human fate
Leonid Leonov: All the blood that has been shed has turned the air bad
Leonid Leonov: Tell me, is it right to kill – in war or anyhow?
Mikhail Lermontov: Still you’re fighting: Why, what for?
Charles Lever: The self-serving drunken oblivion of war
Sinclair Lewis: Selections on war
Sinclair Lewis: Can’t depend On Providence to supply wars when you need them
Sinclair Lewis: The disguised increase, false economizing of war budgets
Sinclair Lewis: Don’t much care what kind of war they prepare for
Sinclair Lewis: General: State of peace far worse than war
Sinclair Lewis: Inevitable war with Canada, Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Japan, or perhaps Staten Island
Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis: Other Unavoidable Wars to End All Wars
Sinclair Lewis: Pining for a good war
Libanius: Rulers more popular for granting mercy than possessing multitudes of soldiers
Libanius: War in time of peace
Jack Lindsay: Who Will Dare Look This Child in the Eyes?
Livy: On the political utility of starting unprovoked wars
Federico García Lorca: War goes crying with a million gray rats
Samuel Lover: The demon of war casts his shadows before
Samuel Lover: The trumpet and the sword
Amy Lowell: A pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?
Lu Hsün: Ballads among bushes of bayonets, hungry dove amid crumbling walls
Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die
Lucian: Rejecting war’s seductive appeal
Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole
Lucretius: Lull to a timely rest the savage works of war
Emil Ludwig: Dialogue on “humanitarian war”
Lycophron: Ares, who banquets in gory battles
Lysias: Those who wage war imitate tyrants
Thomas Macaulay: Drive for transatlantic dominion leads to endless wars, empty treasuries
Thomas Macaulay: Loving war for its own sake
Thomas Macaulay: The self-perpetuating role of the army
Archibald MacLeish: The disastrous war, the silent slain
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
Maurice Maeterlinck: Bloodshed, battle-cry and sword-thrust are the joys of barbarians
Albert Maltz: A children’s wartime bestiary
Albert Maltz: Conquering the world but losing your son
Albert Maltz: “Ten thousand dead today. That’s what the war means.”
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground
Heinrich Mann: Nietzsche, war and the butchery of ten to twenty million souls
Heinrich Mann: Nowadays the real power is peace
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
Thomas Mann: By nature evil and harmful, war is destructive even to the victor
Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war
Thomas Mann: Parallel, oracle and warning
Thomas Mann: Tolstoy, a force that could have stopped war
Thomas Mann: War is a blood-orgy of egotism, corruption, and vileness
Thomas Mann: William Faulkner’s love for man, protest against militarism and war
Jacques Maritain: What good one can expect from such a war and its pitiless prolongation?
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
Christopher Marlowe: Parricide and filicide. While lions war, poor lambs perish.
José Martí: Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics
Martial: Let the mad be eager for wars and fierce Mars
Roger Martin du Gard: Selections on war
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
Roger Martin du Gard: All the pageantry of war cannot redeem its beastliness
Roger Martin du Gard: “Anything rather than the madness, the horrors of a war!”
Roger Martin du Gard: Be loyal to yourselves, reject war
Roger Martin du Gard: Deliberately infecting a country with war neurosis
Roger Martin du Gard: “Drop your rifles. Revolt!”
Roger Martin du Gard: General strike for peace
Roger Martin du Gard: A hundredth part of energy expended in war could have preserved peace
Roger Martin du Gard: How make active war on war?
Roger Martin du Gard: Nothing worse than war and all it involves
Roger Martin du Gard: Romain Rolland
Roger Martin du Gard: A thousand times more honor in preserving peace than waging war
Roger Martin du Gard: Tragedy of war, like that of Oedipus, occurs because warnings are ignored
Roger Martin du Gard: War breeds atmosphere of lies, officials lies
Roger Martin du Gard: War’s “serviceable lie” costs tens of thousands of lives
Andrew Marvell: War all this doth overgrow
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
Philip Massinger: Famine, blood, and death, Bellona’s pages
Philip Massinger: Mustn’t change ploughshares into swords
Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
Edgar Lee Masters: The words, Pro Patria, what do they mean, anyway?
Guy de Maupassant: Selections on war
Guy de Maupassant: The Horrible
Guy de Maupassant: How and why wars are plotted
Guy de Maupassant: I only pray that our sons may never see any wars again
Guy de Maupassant: Military hysteria, military presumptuousness
Guy de Maupassant: Why does society not rise up bodily in rebellion at the word “war”?
Vladimir Mayakovsky: Hurl a question to their faces: Why are we fighting?
Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace
Herman Melville: War-pits and rattraps. Soldier sold to the army as Faust sold himself to the devil.
Albert Memmi: So the war had caught up with us, a celebration in honor of death
Menander: Inglorious military vainglory
H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men
George Meredith: The Olive Branch
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
Dmitry Merezhkovsky : His God is not at all the God of the Christians, but the ancient, pagan Mars
Prosper Mérimée: To the shame of humanity, horrors of war have their charm
Robert Merle: The present war, and all the previous wars, and all the wars to come
Robert Merle: There’s no such thing as a just or sacred war
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Arnold Schoenberg: Peace on Earth
Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors
Thomas Middleton: Selections on peace and war
Thomas Middleton: All made to make a peace, and not a war
Thomas Middleton: Blood-quaffing Mars, who wash’d himself in gore
Thomas Middleton: Let them that seek Peace, find Peace and enjoy Peace
Thomas Middleton: O thrice-peaceful souls, whom neither threats nor strife nor wars controls!
Thomas Middleton: The Peacemaker
Thomas Middleton: The soldier’s fate
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence
Minucius Felix: War and the birth of empire
Octave Mirbeau: Selections on war
Octave Mirbeau: War, apprenticeship in man-killing
Montaigne: Blood on the sword: From slaughter of animals to slaughter of men
Montaigne: The ignominy of lopsided military conquest
Montaigne: Invasion concerns all men; not so defense: that concerns only the rich
Montaigne: It is enough to dip our pens in ink without dipping them in blood
Montaigne: Monstrous war waged for frivolous reasons
Montaigne: This furious monster war
Montaigne: War, that malady of mankind
Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere
Montesquieu: Distemper of militarism brings nothing but public ruin
Montesquieu: Military glory leads to torrents of blood overspreading the earth
Montesquieu: Wars abroad aggravate conflicts at home
Henry de Montherlant: A constant state of crime against humanity
William Vaughn Moody: Bullet’s scream went wide of its mark to its homeland’s heart
George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine
George Moore: War and disillusionment
Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war
Paul Morand: The magic disappearance of ten millions of war dead
Paul Morand: Nations never lay down their arms; death which is still combative
Paul Morand: The War for Righteousness ends in the burying of moral sense
Alberto Moravia: Selections on war
Alberto Moravia: “Ah well, war is war, you know”
Alberto Moravia: Even in uniform and with a chest covered with medals, always a thief and a murderer
Alberto Moravia: That is what war is like, the war is everywhere
Alberto Moravia: Torn colored posters inciting people to war
Alberto Moravia: War destroys all things seen and unseen
Alberto Moravia: War survives in our souls long after it is over
Charles Morice: Woe to you enemies of peace
Christopher Morley: No enthusiasm for hymns of hate
William Morris: No man knew the sight of blood
William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home
Alfred de Musset: “No, none of these things, but simply peace.”
Lilika Nakos: Selections on war
Lilika Nakos: The dead man, the living, the house; all were smashed to bits
Lilika Nakos: Do I know what makes men kill each other?
Lilika Nakos: Do you think the war will ever end?
Lilika Nakos: The grandmother’s sin
Lilika Nakos: “Surely God didn’t intend this butchery”
Lilika Nakos: “What’s the war got to do with God?”
Thomas Nashe: Swords may not fight with fate
Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise
Alfred Neumann: Selections on war
Alfred Neumann: Debunking the glory of twenty murderous years, the greatest mass-murderer in history
Alfred Neumann: Empire destroys peace, converts liberalism into harvest of blood
Alfred Neumann: European hegemony emerges from piled-up corpses, out of recent graves
Alfred Neumann: Four thousand miles of fratricidal murder
Alfred Neumann: Modern war, the murderous happiness of the greatest number
Alfred Neumann: The morals and manners of the War God
Alfred Neumann: Sacred recalcitrance toward the black hatred of war
Alfred Neumann: The stench of burning flesh. That happens sometimes.
Alfred Neumann: Ten million lives for one man’s glory; the emperor changes his hat
Alfred Neumann: Twilight of a conqueror
Alfred Neumann: The ultima ratio of all dictatorships: war
Alfred Neumann: War and the stock market
Alfred Neumann: War, the Great Incendiary, the everlasting prototype of annihilation
Alfred Neumann: War is not ambiguous after all, but a horribly intelligent affair
Alfred Neumann: The War Minister
Alfred Neumann: War nights were never silent
Alfred Neumann: War: Sad, hate-filled, hopeless and God-forsaken
Alfred Neumann: War’s arena, a monstrous distortion, a blasphemous coupling of life and death
Martin Andersen Nexø : From warlike giant to hysterical popinjay
Paul Nizan: War completely assembled, like a mighty engine
Charles Nodier: Fruitless is the glory of battles
Charles Nodier: Painful to the eyes and the heart of he who cherishes liberty
Nonnos: Brother-murdering blade. Disarming the god of war.
Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace
Alfred Noyes: Selections on war
Alfred Noyes: And the cost of war, they reckoned it In little disks of gold
Alfred Noyes: The Dawn of Peace
Alfred Noyes: Medicine driven back in defeat by the nightmare chaos of war
Alfred Noyes: Out of the obscene seas of slaughter
Alfred Noyes: Scarecrows that once were men
Alfred Noyes: A shuddering lump of tattered wounds lifted up a mangled head and whined
Alfred Noyes: Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!
Alfred Noyes: They say that war’s a noble thing!
Alfred Noyes: Turning wasteful strength of war to accomplish large and fruitful tasks of peace
Alfred Noyes: The Victory Ball
Alfred Noyes: War, hypocritical word for universal murder
Alfred Noyes: War they tell me is a noble thing
Alfred Noyes: When they talked of war, they thought of sawdust, not of blood
Sean O’Casey: Battles of war changed for battles of peace
Sean O’Casey: The dead of wars past clasp their colder arms around the newer dead
Sean O’Casey: The Prince of Peace transformed into the god of war
Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one
Kenzaburō Ōe: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever
Kenzaburo Ōe: Nuclear war and its lemmings
Liam O’Flaherty: The foul horror of war
Liam O’Flaherty: Sounds from a dead world. Nothing but worms and rats feeding on death.
Georges Ohnet: Pillaging in the wake of victorious armies
Zoé Oldenbourg: War provides a feast for the vultures
John Oldham: The cup and the sword
Eugene O’Neill: The hell that follows war
Ovid: Golden Age, before weapons were warm and bloodstained from killing
Ovid: Instead of a wolf the timorous ewes dread war
Wildred Owen: Selections on war
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Wilfred Owen: From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept
Wilfred Owen: Multitudinous murders they once witnessed
Wilfred Owen: The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
Wilfred Owen: Pawing us who dealt them war and madness
Wildred Owen: Rushed in the body to enter hell and there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
Wilfred Owen: The sons we offered might regret they died if we got nothing lasting in their stead
Wildred Owen: Strange meeting: I am the enemy you killed, my friend
Thomas Parnell: Lovely, lasting peace, appear!
Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another
Walter Pater: What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Deity of Slaughter.
Coventry Patmore: Peace in life and art
Pausanias: Peace cradling Wealth in her arms
Cesare Pavese: Every war is a civil war
Cesare Pavese: A moment of peace, to be reborn into a bloodless world
Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God
Benjamin Péret: Little song for the maimed
Benito Pérez Galdós: Cannon should be cast into church bells
Benito Pérez Galdós: Good God! why are there wars?
Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace
David Graham Phillips: Captains of industry, industrial warfare, marauders and renegade generals
Philo: “Ah, my friends, how should you not hate war and love peace?”
Philo: Casting off the warlike spirit in its completeness
Philo: “Nourished” for war and all its attendant evils
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Plato: All wars arise for the sake of gaining money
Plato: A good city has peace, but the evil city is full of wars within and without
Plato: The highest good is not war but peace
Plato: No true statesman looks only, or first of all, to external warfare
Plato: Socrates on the eulogizing of war heroes
Plato: They both hate and are hated. Silver and gold and war.
Plato: The tyrant is always stirring up war, the oligarchy uses force of arms to gain power
Pliny the Elder: Crime and slaughter and warfare. Humanity’s war against its mother
Pliny the Elder: Curious disease of the sublunary, sanguinary human mind
Plotinus: Let earth be at peace and sea, air and the very heavens
Plutarch: Selections on war and peace
Plutarch: Entire and universal cessation of war
Plutarch: Lover of peace changed the first month of the year
Plutarch: Motivations and consequences of war
Plutarch: Numa’s guardians of peace
Plutarch: On war and its opponents
Plutarch: The privilege of being wounded and killed in war for the defense of their creditors
Plutarch: Venus, who more than the rest of the gods and goddesses abhors force and war
Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest
Polybius: The bestialization of man by war
Ernest Poole: Apply for death certificates here. War’s house of death.
Ernest Poole: War cuts off the past from the future
Ernest Poole: War was the fashion. War was a pageant, a thing of romance.
Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend
Alexander Pope: War, horrid war, your thoughtful walks invades
Alexander Pope: Where Peace scatters blessings from her dovelike wing
Vladimir Pozner: Mars and Ceres
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Matthew Prior: A new golden age free from fierce Bellona’s rage
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Prudentius: Cruel warfare angers God
Publilius Syrus: Better plow than weapon
Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war
Francisco de Quevedo: Metal against metal: Learning causes peace to be sought after
Francisco de Quevedo: The soldierly virtues of ardor, candor, honor and valor
Quintilian: War, the antithesis of justice
Quintus Smyrnaeus: Mass murder’s tropes: Dread Ares drank his fill of blood
Quintus Smyrnaeus: While here all war’s marvels were portrayed, there were the works of lovely peace
C.F. Ramuz: Little by little the war spreads
Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties
Herbert Read: The Happy Warrior
Charles Reade: To God? Rather to war and his sister and to the god of lies
Charles Reade: War is sweet to those who have never experienced it
Erich Maria Remarque: Selections on war
Erich Maria Remarque: After the war: The day of great dreams for the future of mankind was past
Erich Maria Remarque: The front begins and we become on the instant human animals
Erich Maria Remarque: It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation
Erich Maria Remarque: Like a dove, a lonely white dove of assurance and peace
Erich Maria Remarque: Now, for the first time, I feel it; I see it; I comprehend it fully: Peace.
Erich Maria Remarque: On every yard there lies a dead man
Erich Maria Remarque: War dreams
Erich Maria Remarque: The war has ruined us for everything
Erich Maria Remarque: War, mass production of corpses
Erich Maria Remarque: War turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils
Erich Maria Remarque: A war veteran’s indictment
Erich Maria Remarque: War was everywhere. Everywhere, even in the brain and the heart.
Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms
Erich Maria Remarque: We want to be men again, not war machines!
Erich Maria Remarque: We were making war against ourselves without knowing it
Erich Maria Remarque: What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over?
Erich Maria Remarque: With the melting came the dead
Erich Maria Remarque: Worse than a slaughterhouse
Jean Paul Richter: The Goddess of Peace
James Whitcomb Riley: Sang! sang on! sang hate – sang war –
Emmanuel Roblès: Respect is first due to the living
Samuel Rogers: War and the Great in War let others sing
Samuel Rogers: What tho’ the iron school of War erase each milder virtue…
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
Romain Rolland: A father’s plea against war
Romain Rolland: The abominable war crimes of intellectuals
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: America and the war against war
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Romain Rolland: Centuries to recreate what war destroys in a day
Romain Rolland: The collective insanity, the terrible spirit of war
Romain Rolland: Content with having said “No!” to war
Romain Rolland: The enormous iniquity, the ignoble calculations of war
Romain Rolland: Hatred and holy butchery; the deadly sophistry, carnivorous poetry of war
Romain Rolland on Henri Barbusse: The isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die
Romain Rolland: The life that would have been, the life that was not going to be
Romain Rolland: Message to America on the will to conquer the world
Romain Rolland: Our Neighbor the Enemy
Romain Rolland: Pacifism only allowed when it is not effective
Romain Rolland: Peace and war are in the hands of those who hold the purse-strings
Romain Rolland: Real peace demands that the masters of war be eliminated
Romain Rolland: Reawakening of old instincts of national pride, lapping of blood
Romain Rolland: Recurrence of the hell of war
Romain Rolland: To the Murdered Peoples
Romain Rolland: To the undying Antigone; waging war against war
Romain Rolland: Totalizing, to their personal profit, the ruin of all nations
Romain Rolland: War, a divine monster; half-beast, half-god
Romain Rolland: War, a pathological fact, a plague of the soul
Romain Rolland: War and the factories of intellectual munitions and cannon
Romain Rolland: War enriches a few, and ruins the community
Romain Rolland: When we defend war, dare to admit we are defending slavery
Romain Rolland: Where to rebuild the world after war?
Romain Rolland: Youth delivered up to the sword of war
Jules Romains: Selections on war
Jules Romains: Colloquy on God and war
Jules Romains: Communion of saints opposing war’s mutual massacre, human sacrifice
Jules Romains: Condign punishment for war profiteers and professional patriots
Jules Romains: Deadening effects of war on human sensibilities, defeat of civilization by barbarism
Jules Romains: Destruction of war itself, its deletion from the pages of history
Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace
Jules Romains: If mankind could put two and two together, there’d be no more war
Jules Romains: Just kill because the more dead there are, the fewer living will remain
Jules Romains: Romantic view of war played a dirty trick on the warriors
Jules Romains: Squalidly degrading everything that the civilization of mankind had created
Jules Romains: Unnatural war will only stop when everybody, on both sides, is killed
Jules Romains: War means a golden age for the munitions makers
Jules Romains: War: symphony of death, vast pudding concocted of corpses
Jules Romains: War turns murder into a public and highly praiseworthy action
Jules Romains: War under modern conditions has need of everything that man produces
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump
Isaac Rosenberg: O! ancient crimson curse! On receiving news of the war
Isaac Rosenberg: Soldier: Twentieth Century
Claude Roy: Great wars and those which kill just as effectively
Gabrielle Roy: This was the hope that was uplifting mankind once again: to do away with war
Rutilius Namatianus: Races of demigods who knew not iron-harnessed Mars
Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference
Miguel de Salabert: I first learned about men from their bombs
Miguel de Salabert: “What have you done with my legs?”
Miguel de Salabert: When they gave me a rifle to carry, I knew my life was over
Sallust: Lust for dominion the reason for war
Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: The grandeur, the selflessness of war
George Sand: Trader in uniformed flesh and the religion of self
Carl Sandburg: What it costs to move two buttons one inch on the war map
George Santayana: Selections on war
George Santayana on war and militarism
George Santayana: Fatal wars: equally needless, equally murderous
George Santayana: Only the dead have seen the end of war
George Santayana: Such blind battles ought not to be our battles
George Santayana: We want peace and make war
Jean-Paul Sartre: They lift their heads and look up at the sky, the poisonous sky
Jean-Paul Sartre: When staging a massacre, all soldiers look alike
Jean-Paul Sartre: When the rich fight the rich, it is the poor who die
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man
Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph
Siegfried Sassoon: The foul beast of war that bludgeons life
Siegfried Sassoon: Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded
Siegfried Sassoon: Repression of War Experience
Siegfried Sassoon: To Any Dead Officer
Siegfried Sassoon: The Tombstone-Maker
Siegfried Sassoon: The unheroic dead who fed the guns, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones
Siegfried Sassoon: War, remorse and reconciliation
Siegfried Sassoon: We left our holes and looked above the wreckage of the earth
Scandinavian writers on peace and war
Friedrich Schiller: Beauty, peace and reconciliation
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
Arthur Schnitzler: Cannot praise war in general and oppose individual wars
Arthur Schnitzler: Remold the structure of government so that war becomes impossible
Arthur Schnitzler: War, making fathers pay wages to their sons whom we sent to their deaths
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands
John Scott: I hate that drum’s discordant sound
Walter Scott: War’s cannibal priest, druid red from his human sacrifice
Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
Seneca the Elder: It is this that drives the world into war
Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion
Shakespeare: So inured to war that mothers smile as their children are slain
William Shakespeare: Works of poetry outlast the works of war
George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war
George Bernard Shaw: The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors
George Bernard Shaw: Gadarene swine running violently into a hell of high explosives
George Bernard Shaw: Little Minds and Big Battles
George Bernard Shaw: The Long Arm of War
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War
George Bernard Shaw: Rabid war maniacs reversed the order of nature
George Bernard Shaw: Religion of ruthless competition inevitably leads to war
George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction
George Bernard Shaw: War and frivolous exultation in death for its own sake
George Bernard Shaw: War and the sufferings of the sane
George Bernard Shaw: War Delirium
George Bernard Shaw: War, governments and munitions manufacturers
George Bernard Shaw: War, the Yahoo and the angry ape
George Bernard Shaw: The way of the soldier is the way of death
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Man fabricates the sword which stabs his peace
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Earth cleansed of quivers, spears and gorgon-headed shields
William Shenstone: Ah, hapless realms! that war’s oppression feel.
William Shenstone: Let the gull’d fool the toils of war pursue
William Shenstone: War, where bleed the many to enrich the few
Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission…at sword’s point
James Shirley: Some men with swords may reap the field and plant fresh laurels where they kill
Mikhail Sholokhov: Selections on war
Mikhail Sholokhov: His entire face a cry, screaming without opening his lips
Mikhail Sholokhov: People worse than wolves. And it was called a heroic exploit.
Mikhail Sholokhov: Visit to a military hospital
Mikhail Sholokhov: War’s bitter harvest
Mikhail Sholokhov: Who was he calling for in his hour of death?
Mikhail Sholokhov: With innumerable hands the soldiers reached out to the phantasmal word “peace”
Ignazio Silone: Resorting to the bloody diversion of war
Ignazio Silone: They have been warned of wars and rumors of wars
Ignazio Silone: War with today’s hereditary enemy
Victor Domingo Silva: Cain, the fratricide
Simonides: Dirges for the victims of the impetuous War-God
Upton Sinclair: Selections on war
Upton Sinclair: After war, the color revolution cleanup
Upton Sinclair: A banker’s post-war nightmare
Upton Sinclair: Decade of national cynicism, corruption followed “war for democracy”
Upton Sinclair: Gigantic stir of war preparation for global territorial aggrandizement
Upton Sinclair: How wars start, how they can be prevented
Upton Sinclair: The Juggernaut of war flattens out all opposition
Upton Sinclair: New Lysistratas: Women must refuse to have babies until men stop killing
Upton Sinclair: Spending several times as much money to prepare for an even greater war to end war
Upton Sinclair: Using all the machinery and brains of civilization to slaughter one another
Upton Sinclair: The war system, bankers recouping the costs of war propaganda
Upton Sinclair: War’s one-sided boost to the economy
Upton Sinclair: What it costs a woman to keep the world at war
Upton Sinclair: World war as a business enterprise
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Christopher Smart: Rejoice with the dove. Pray that all guns be nailed up.
Thorne Smith: Make statues of war’s wholesale butchers before they strike
Tobias Smollett: War contractors fattened on the blood of the nation
C.P. Snow: As final product of scientific civilization, nuclear bomb is its ultimate indictment
C.P. Snow: Even if moral judgments are left out, it’s unthinkable to drop the bomb
C.P. Snow: Hiroshima, the most horrible single act so far performed
C.P. Snow: Hope it’s never possible to develop superbomb
Robert Southey: Selections on peace and war
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Robert Southey: Preparing the way for peace; militarism versus Christianity
Robert Southey: The Soldier’s Wife
Robert Southey: Wade to glory through a sea of blood
Robert Southey: Year follows year, and still we madly prosecute the war
Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars
Wole Soyinka: Civilian and Soldier
Spanish writers on war and peace
Stephen Spender: Selections on war
Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stephen Spender: The Woolfs in the 1930s: War the inevitable result of an arms race.
Edmund Spenser: The first to attack the world with sword and fire
Edmund Spenser: Wars can nought but sorrows yield
Stendhal: Dreaming of the Marshall and his glory…
Stendhal: You’ve got to learn the business before you can become a soldier
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Frank Stockton: Battles of annihilation, the Anglo-American War Syndicate
Frank Stockton: The Great War Syndicate: “On to Canada!”
Strabo: Ares, the only god they worship
Strabo: Studying war is wickedness
Lytton Strachey: After the battle, who shall say that the corpses were the most unfortunate?
August Strindberg: Progeny of soulless militarism
August Strindberg: What has become of the sacred promise of peace on our earth?
Hermann Sudermann: Militarism and its terminus
Hermann Sudermann: War irrigates the soil with blood, fertilizes it with corpses
Eugène Sue: War, murder by proxy
Suetonius: Caligula and military glory
Suetonius: Not let slip any pretext for war, however unjust and dangerous
Archil Sulakauri: I just can’t believe that people die so simply
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Algernon Charles Swinburne: Death made drunk with war
Algernon Charles Swinburne : A gospel of war and damnation for the bestial by birth
Algernon Charles Swinburne: There shall be no more wars nor kingdoms won
Frank Swinnerton: Aerial bombardment, the most stupid and futile aspect of war
John Addington Symonds: Nation with nation, land with land unarmed shall live as comrades free
Tacitus: The robbery, slaughter and plunder that empire calls peace
Hippolyte Taine on the inhuman travesty of war
Anton Tammsaare: War, the greatest enterprise of the modern age
Alfred Tennyson: Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace
Alfred Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
Tertullian: As a last test of empire, make war on heaven
Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war
Theophrastus: Warmongering’s rumormongering
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
James Thomson: Despise the insensate barbarous trade of war
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
James Thomson: Philosophy’s plans of policy and peace
Henry David Thoreau: Taxes enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood
Thucydides: Admonitions against war
Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Leo Tolstoy: Selections on war
Leo Tolstoy: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est
Leo Tolstoy: Patriotism or Peace
Leo Tolstoy: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”
Leo Tolstoy: Murder and vengeance are not the will of the people
Leo Tolstoy: The Beginning of the End
Leo Tolstoy: Christian cannot be a murderer and therefore cannot be a soldier
Leo Tolstoy: Letter on the Peace Conference
Leo Tolstoy: Idealization of military malefactors is shameful
Leo Tolstoy: Prescription for peace
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Henri Troyat: Selections on war
Henri Troyat: All humanity passing through a crisis of destructive madness
Henri Troyat: Nothing grand, nothing noble, in the universal slaughter
Henri Troyat: Shedding blood for the motherland: War is ugly and absurd
Henri Troyat: So many men killed, so many towns burned…for a telegram
Henri Troyat: Thoughts stop with a shock: War!
Henri Troyat: Tolstoy’s visceral detestation of war
Henri Troyat: War, that greatest of political crimes
Henri Troyat: “Will a day ever come when there’s no more war, no more lies, no more tragedy!”
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Kurt Tucholsky: Murder in disguise
Ivan Turgenev: “Militarism, the soldiery, have got the upper hand”
Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Mark Twain: The basest type of patriotism: support for war and imperialism
Mark Twain: The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)
Mark Twain: Epitome of war, the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity
Mark Twain: Grotesque self-deception of war
Mark Twain: Maxims on battleships and statesmanship
Mark Twain: An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war
Mark Twain: Only dead men dare tell the whole truth about war
Mark Twain: Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War
Mark Twain on Western military threat to China: I am a Boxer
Mark Twain: Cecil Rhodes and the civilizing mission: He wants the earth and wants it for his own
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne
Juan Valera: Thou art the God of peace
Paul Valéry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission
César Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death
Jules Vallès: I hate war and its sinister glory
Mario Vargas Llosa: More than enough atomic and conventional weapons to wipe out several planets
Henry Vaughan: Let us ‘midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss
Henry Vaughan: What thunders shall those men arraign who cannot count those they have slain?
Thorstein Veblen: Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought
Velleius Paterculus: License of the sword inevitably leads to wars for profit
Roger Vercel: Boats built for men to live in, ships built to kill
Vercors: Are war crimes only committed by the vanquished?
Giovanni Verga: The Mother of Sorrows
Émile Verhaeren: I hold war in execration; ashamed to be butchers of their fellows
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
Alfred de Vigny: Selections on war
Alfred de Vigny: Admiration for military commander turns us into slaves and madmen
Alfred de Vigny: The army is a machine wound up to kill
Alfred de Vigny: It is war that is wrong, not we
Alfred de Vigny: War is condemned of God and even of man who holds it in secret horror
Alfred de Vigny: When armies and war exist no more
Virgil: Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?
Elio Vittorini: Dialogue between a dead soldier and his brother
Elio Vittorini: Slaughter perpetrated in the world; one man cries and another laughs
Voltaire: Armies composed of well disciplined hirelings who determine the fate of nations
Voltaire: Bellicose father or pacific son?
Voltaire: He did not put a sufficient number of his fellow creatures to death
Voltaire: One country cannot conquer without making misery for another
Edmund Waller: Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won
Rex Warner: These guns were sent to save civilisation
Thomas Warton: Not seek in fields of blood his warrior bays
Jakob Wassermann: Was there ever since the world began a just cause for war?
H.G. Wells: The abolition of war will be a new phase in the history of life
H.G. Wells: Armaments: Vile and dangerous industry in the human blood trade
H.G. Wells: Either man will put an end to air war or air war will put an end to mankind
H.G. Wells: For the predetermined losing side, modern wars an unspeakable business
H.G. Wells: Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs and his speech is blunt and plain
H.G. Wells: Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war.
H.G. Wells: Nearly everybody wants peace but nobody thinks out the arrangements needed
H.G. Wells: None so detestable as the god of war
H.G. Wells: A number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives to great task of peace
H.G. Wells: The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny
H.G. Wells: Universal collapse logically follows world-wide war
H.G. Wells: War is a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the dead
H.G. Wells: War, road to complete extinction or to degradation beyond our present understanding
H.G. Wells: War will leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children
H.G. Wells: When war comes home
H.G. Wells: Why did humanity gape at the guns and do nothing? War as business
H.G. Wells: The world is weary of this bloodshed, weary of all this weeping
H.G. Wells: The young are the food of war
Franz Werfel: Selections on war
Franz Werfel: Advent of air war and apocalyptic visions
Franz Werfel: Cities disintegrated within seconds in the Last War
Franz Werfel: How describe in a few words a world war?
Franz Werfel: Leaders’ fear of their people drives them to war
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
Franz Werfel: Twenty thousand well-preserved human skulls of the Last War
Franz Werfel: Waging currish, cowardly war to plunder the poor
Franz Werfel: War behind and in front, outside and inside
Franz Werfel: War is the cause and not the result of all conflicts
Nathanael West: Selections on war
Nathanael West: Every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition
Nathanael West: The noble motives, the noble methods of war
Nathanael West: Not their fault, they thought they had bombed a hospital
Nathanael West: One live recruit is better than a dozen dead veterans
Nathanael West: They haven’t the proper military slant
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
John Greenleaf Whittier: Selections on peace and war
John Greenleaf Whittier: Disarmament
John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels
John Greenleaf Whittier: Nobler than the sword’s shall be the sickle’s accolade
John Greenleaf Whittier: The stormy clangor of wild war music o’er the earth shall cease
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Plea To Peace
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Oscar Wilde: Who would dare to praise the barren pride of warring nations?
John Wilmot: With war I’ve not to do
Thomas Wolfe: His imperial country at war, possessed of the inspiration for murder
Thomas Wolfe: Santimony and cant of war
Women writers on peace and war
William Wordsworth: Selections on peace and war
William Wordsworth: All merit centered in the sword; battle’s hecatombs
William Wordsworth: Earth’s groaning field, where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars
William Wordsworth: If men with men in peace abide, all other strength the weakest may withstand
William Wordsworth: Peace in these feverish times is sovereign bliss
William Wordsworth: Proclaimed heroes for strewing meadows with carcasses
William Wordsworth: Prophetic harps were singing, “War shall cease”
William Wordsworth: Spreading peaceful ensigns over war’s favourite playground
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
Henry Wotton: Pastorale. No wars are seen.
Thomas Wyatt: Children of the gun
Thomas Wyatt: Wax fat on innocent blood: I cannot leave the state to Caesar
Xenophon: Socrates’ war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues
Xenophon: War as obsession, warfare as mistress
William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace
Edward Young: Selections on peace and war
Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord
Edward Young: End of war the herald of wisdom and poetry
Edward Young: Reason’s a bloodless conqueror, more glorious than the sword
Edward Young: Such a peace that follows war
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars
Émile Zola: Encomiums on labor and peace
Émile Zola: The forge of peace and the pit of war
Émile Zola: Haunted by military matters
Émile Zola: The military, necessary apprenticeship for devastation and massacre
Émile Zola: One sole city of peace and truth and justice
Émile Zola: Prescription for a happy life in the midst of universal peace
Émile Zola: Vulcan in service to Mars
Émile Zola: War’s vast slaughterhouse
Émile Zola: Why armies are maintained
Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones
Arnold Zweig: Selections on war
Arnold Zweig: Conducting the business of murder with embittered reluctance
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
Arnold Zweig: The final trump in the struggle for world markets: the Gun
Arnold Zweig: From the joy of the slayer to being dimly aware of the man on the other side
Arnold Zweig: In the war you’ve lost all the personality you’ve ever had
Arnold Zweig: Keep the war going to the last drop of – other – people’s blood
Arnold Zweig: The meaning, or rather the meaninglessness, of war
Arnold Zweig: Mere existence of armies imposes upon mankind the mentality of the Stone Age
Arnold Zweig: Military strips nation of all that is worthy of defense
Arnold Zweig: Never again! On reading Barbusse
Arnold Zweig: No joy to be born into world of war
Arnold Zweig: Of course, one had to shoot at crowds of civilians, men, women and children
Arnold Zweig: Only the wrong people are killed in a war
Arnold Zweig: The plague has always played a part in war
Arnold Zweig: Pro-war clerks and clerics are Herod’s mercenaries
Arnold Zweig: Reason is the highest patriotism and militarism is evil its very essence
Arnold Zweig: They won no more ground than they could cover with their corpses
Arnold Zweig: War a deliberate act, not an unavoidable natural catastrophe
Arnold Zweig: War, a gigantic undertaking on the part of the destruction industry
Arnold Zweig: War of all against all, jaded multitudes of death
Arnold Zweig: War transforms rescue parties into murder parties
Arnold Zweig: War was in the world, and war prevailed
Arnold Zweig: War’s brutality, folly and tyranny practiced even on its own
Arnold Zweig: War’s communion, hideous multiplication of human disasters
Arnold Zweig: War’s hecatomb from the air, on land and at sea
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria
Stefan Zweig: Romain Rolland and the campaign against hatred
