All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

from an 1888 address to Congress

The Atomic Age is here to stay--but are we?

Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or world destruction.

War does not determine who is right, only who is left.

Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man has a right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

Peace is constructed, not fought for.

After each war there is a little less democracy left to save.

Atkinson was an American journalist who lived from 1864-1984. (quote from 'The Anti-War Quote Book,' edited Eric Groves, Sr., pub. Quirk Books, 2008)

Blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed.

This was part of Springsteen's introduction to his 1985 version of Edwin Starr's song 'War.'

Coercive practices that threaten our neighbor(s) also threaten us.

The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection.

In this war – as in others – I am less interested in honoring the dead than in preventing the dead.

No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

A rational army would run away.

Commonly known just as 'Montesquieu,' Charles (1869-1755) was a social commentator and thinker of the French Enlightenment.

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.

from "The Spirit of Laws" (1748)

If a war be undertaken...before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.

The voice of protest...is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum...is bidding all men...obey in silence the tyrannous word of command.