"And I should not like to forget the hint which I have already given once before, on 1 September 1939, in the German Reichstag — that should the other world be plunged into a general war, Jewry as a whole will have played out its role in Europe. They can laugh at this today just as they laughed at my prophecies before. The coming months and years will prove that here too I was right."

"I have played straight with the Jews. On the eve of war I gave them a last warning. I warned them that if they again plunged the world into war, they would not be spared this time — that the vermin would be finally exterminated in Europe. They replied to this warning by a declaration of war. . . . We have pierced the Jewish abscess. The world of the future will be eternally grateful to us."

"the red father of war who signs his name in the blood of other men"

"Bleak are our shores with the blasts of December, Fettered and chill is the rivulet's flow; Throbbing and warm are the hearts that remember Who was our friend when the world was our foe."

"I war not with the dead."

"Cursed is the man, and void of law and right, Unworthy property, unworthy light, Unfit for public rule, or private care, That wretch, that monster, who delights in war;"

"Take thou thy arms and come with me, For we must quit ourselves like men, and strive To aid our cause, although we be but two. Great is the strength of feeble arms combined, And we can combat even with the brave."

"The chance of war Is equal, and the slayer oft is slain."

"It is not right to exult over slain men."

"So ends the bloody business of the day."

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war."

"Nimirum hic ego sum."

"Postquam Discordia tetra Belli ferratos postes portasque refregit."

"Ye who made war that your ships Should lay to at the beck of no nation, Make war now on Murder, that slips The leash of her hounds of damnation; Ye who remembered the Alamo, Remember the Maine!"

"We cannot well exaggerate ... the horrors, the hateful ravages, and the countless expense of war... show plainly to our children that war, with its embodied woes and furies must be avoided."

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored: He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on."

"L'Angleterre prit l'aigle, et l'Autriche l'aiglon."

"Earth was the meadow, he the mower strong."

"The sinews of war are those two metals (gold and silver)."

"Individuals who commit serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent – that is, intentionally or recklessly – may be prosecuted for war crimes. Individuals may also be held criminally liable for assisting in, facilitating, aiding, or abetting a war crime. All governments that are parties to an armed conflict are obligated to investigate alleged war crimes by members of their armed forces."

"The closeness of their intercourse [the intercourse of nations] will assuredly render war as absurd and impossible by-and-by, as it would be for Manchester to fight with Birmingham, or Holborn Hill with the Strand."

"If we do not change course quickly, we will inevitably encounter an incident where that first domino is tipped—triggering a sequence of unstoppable events that will mark the end of our time on this tiny planet... My hope lies in... the leaders of communities and social movements, big and small, who are willing to forfeit everything—including their lives—in defence of human rights."

"All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder."

"Pavlov’s findings were confirmed in the most distressing manner, and on a very large scale, during the two World Wars. As the result of a single catastrophic experience, or of a succession of terrors less appalling but frequently repeated, soldiers develop a number of disabling psycho-physical symptoms. Temporary unconsciousness, extreme agitation, lethargy, functional blindness or paralysis, completely unrealistic responses to the challenge of events, strange reversals of life-long patterns of behaviour—all the symptoms, which Pavlov observed in his dogs, re-appeared among the victims of what in the First World War was called ‘shell shock’, in the Second, ‘battle fatigue’. Every man, like every dog, has his own individual limit of endurance. Most men reach their limit after about thirty days of more or less continuous stress under the conditions of modern combat. The more than averagely susceptible succumb in only fifteen days. The more than averagely tough can resist for forty-five or even fifty days. Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity."

"I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."

"Attempts to prohibit the use of particular weapons in warfare have been made in various civilizations over a long period of time....[I]n ancient times, the Laws of Manu (the greatest of the Hindu codes prohibited Hindus from using poisoned arrows; and the Greeks and Romans customarily observed a prohibition against using poison or poisoned weapons. During the Middle Ages the Lateran Council of 1132 declared that the crossbow [was prohibited.]"

"Colonial powers have long recruited soldiers from the periphery to fight wars at the center. …When war becomes a business model, and soldiers are sourced like cheap labor, we are no longer in the realm of politics. We are in the realm of trafficking."

"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

"Then, sir, we will give them the bayonet!"

"You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight."

"Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic."

"YOU are going to hear of wars and reports of wars; see that YOU are not terrified. For these things must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place after another. All these things are a beginning of pangs of distress."

"He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off."

"The safety of the country is at stake…. We must let ourselves be killed on the spot rather than retreat…. No faltering can be tolerated today."

"The armies most successful in war are those in which every combatant has a clear conscience."

"And war broke out in heaven: Mi′cha•el and his angels battled with the dragon, and the dragon and its angels battled but it did not prevail, neither was a place found for them any longer in heaven. So down the great dragon was hurled, the original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth; he was hurled down to the earth, and his angels were hurled down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven say:"

"How many men who listen to me tonight have served their nation in other wars? How very many are not here to listen? The war in Vietnam is not like these other wars. Yet, finally, war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. It is a crime against mankind... Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world."

"Among the calamities of war, may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages."

"I have prayed in her fields of poppies, I have laughed with the men who died— But in all my ways and through all my days Like a friend He walked beside. I have seen a sight under Heaven That only God understands, In the battles' glare I have seen Christ there With the Sword of God in His hand."

"Every battle, every war - is fought for things worth dying for."

"Men dying is a relative thing. The effect of the air campaign is a cumulative one and no one can predict which blow will be the crucial blow [to the enemy]."

"A navy is essentially and necessarily aristocratic. True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending they can never be practically applied or even admitted on board ship, out of port, or off soundings. This may seem a hardship, but it is nevertheless the simplest of truths. Whilst the ships sent forth by the Congress may and must fight for the principles of human rights and republican freedom, the ships themselves must be ruled and commanded at sea under a system of absolute despotism."

"The Philistines be upon thee, Samson."

"The people arose as one man."

"War is expensive. Winning a war, however, is less expensive than losing one."

"In war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high."

"Its is important, too, to realize that deadly violence among primitives is not even remotely comparable to modern warfare. When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call "freedom". In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he's unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow -or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous."

"(While smiling, and jokingly) You haven't come to see me for three weeks. I wondered whether you had become disgusted with us war criminals - particularly me, the so-called archcriminal of them all."

"Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills."