"The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals."
Edward
Abbey
"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America's] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own... She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. ... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
John Quincy Adams
Brooks
Atkinson
Stephen E. Ambrose, Professor of History, University of New Orleans, in his book 'Rise to Globalism, American Foreign Policy since 1938'
"To save your world you asked this man to die; Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?"
W. H. Auden, Epitaph for an unknown soldier
"Two
armies that fight each other is
like one large army that commits suicide."
French soldier Henri Barbusse, in his novel "Le Feu", 1915
Ambrose Bierce
"War is God's way of
teaching Americans geography."
Ambrose Bierce
"Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a Republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State .... It automatically sets in motion throughout society these irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense."
Randolph
Bourne (1886-1918), in War and the Intellectuals, 1964
"The
way
to keep America free and
secure is to
stay out of wars that do not affect our vital interests, and let alien
societies work out their own destinies. As time was our ally against
communism,
which did not work, so time is our ally against Islamism, which also
does
not work."
"There are no warlike people -- just warlike leaders."
Ralph Bunche
George W. Bush; First presidential debate
"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."
George
W. Bush, from a speech at the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development in
Wash. DC, 6/18/02
Note: Orwell would be so proud! RAB
U.S.
Marine
Corps Major
General Smedley
Butler
Albert Camus
"The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train
as inevitably as clouds announce a storm."
"War
is a
quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own
battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village,
stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like
wild beasts against each other."
Thomas Carlyle
Bruce
Catton, in
'The
Civil War' (New York, 1971), 185
G.K.
Chesterton
"A man who says
that no patriot should attack the war until it is
over ... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until
she has fallen."
G.K.
Chesterton
"War
is the normal occupation
of man. War - and gardening."
"War is mainly a catalogue of blunders."
Winston Churchill
"War
is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't
smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can."
Winston Churchill
"When
you are winning a war almost everything that
happens can be claimed to be right and wise."
Winston Churchill
"When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin."
Winston Churchill"The sinews of war are infinite money."
Cicero
"During war, the laws are silent."
Cicero
"There are no politics in war. Politics is the luxury of the safe-at-home. War is a
lottery of survival."
John Cory
"No one would be foolish enough to choose war over peace -- in peace sons bury their
fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."
Croesus of Lydia
"Science
tell us how to heal and how to kill. It reduces the death rate in
retail and then kills us wholesale in war."
Will Durant
"Every
vice
was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred
becomes respectable in time of war."
"I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I
am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people
themselves refuse to go to war."
Albert Einstein
"The
pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service."
"The
enemy
aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine, and
barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny
imposed by the deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally
capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal
peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal
mines."
John T. Flynn,
As We Go Marching, 1944
"No matter
what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and
modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no
lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent
the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this
righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war
to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently
be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes
an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind."
John T. Flynn, As
We Go Marching, 1944
"The
so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal
freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing,
lying, cruelty - all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is
the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful
lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with
decorations and public acclaim. You cannot, when the war is proclaimed,
pull a switch and turn the community from the moral code of peace to
that of war and then, when the armistice is signed, pull a nother
switch and reconnect the whole society with its old moral regulations
again. Thousands of people of all ranks who have found a relish in the
morals of war come back to you with these rudimentary instincts
controlling their behavior while thousands of others, trapped in a sort
of no man's land between these two moralities, come back to you
poisoned by cynicism."
John
T. Flynn, As We Go Marching, 1944
"The
tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst."
David
Friedman
"Now is, in short, the time for a return to first principles. Properly labeling the
present conflict is not a panacea. But making it clear that we are engaged in nothing
less than a War for the Free World will make it easier to take the steps necessary, both
at home and abroad, to secure the victory we literally cannot live without."
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., prominent neocon warmonger
"We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no
war. And we none of us believe it."
John Galsworthy
(Mohandas Karamchand) (1869-1948) Indian Social Reformer and Spiritual Leader, in Non-Violence in Peace and War [1949]
"The idea of imposing universal peace on the world by force is a barbarian fantasy."
Garet Garrett, (1878-1954) American Journalist and Author
"The war had profoundly altered the significance and status of American industry. . . .
During and after the war, industry came to be regarded as an attribute of state power,
almost as clearly such as the military establishment. And why not? Security, independence,
national welfare, economic advantage, diplomatic prestige--were not all as dependent upon
efficient machine industry as upon an army or navy? . . . The new way of thinking about
industry, therefore, was basically political. A factory thereafter would be like a ship -
a thing to be privately owned and privately enjoyed only in time of peace, always subject
to mobilization for war."
Garet Garrett
"Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies."
David Lloyd George
"War
has always been fatal to liberalism."
David Lloyd George
"We
are muddled into war."
David Lloyd George
"Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the
plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging
the very hills?"
Kahlil Gibran
"War
doesn't make boys men, it makes men dead." Photo by Phaedra Wilkinson http://www.myspace.com/phaewilk |
"Why, of course,
the people
don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a
farm
want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it
is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people
don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor
for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is
the leaders of the country
who determine the policy and it is
always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a
democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a
Parliament or a Communist
dictatorship. ... (T)he people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you
have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the
pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It
works the same way in any country."
Herman Goering, at the Nuremberg trials
Paul
Greenberg
Chris
Hedges, in
'War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning',
Public Affairs, 2002, p. 147
"The
rush of
battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war
is
a drug, one I ingested for years. It is peddled by
mythmakers-historians,
war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state - all of whom
endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism,
power,
chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and
fantastic
universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture,
distorts
memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even
humor,
which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death.
Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our
place
on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the
lowest
depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the
surface within all of us."
Chris Hedges, 'War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning'
"(W)ar
in the end
is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers
by politicians, and of idealists by cynics."
Ernest
Hemingway
"Never think that war, no matter
how necessary, nor how
justified, is not a crime."
Ernest Hemingway
"War is no longer
made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever
was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and
dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them
into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted
reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule. And we in
America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually
or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into
a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all
the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to
an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the
time of crisis comes."
Ernest Hemingway,
"Notes on the Next War" in Esquire [September 1935]
"There
is nothing
conservative
about war. For at least the last century war has been the herald and
handmaid
of socialism and state control. It is the excuse for censorship,
organized
lying, regulation and taxation. It is paradise for the busybody and the
nark. ..."
Peter
Hitchens
Aldous Huxley
"Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against
manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against
preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb,
obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!"
Helen Keller
"War
will exist
until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same
reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
John
F. Kennedy
"If
any question
why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied."
Rudyard
Kipling
"War is, at first, the hope that we will be better off; next, the expectation that the
other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and,
finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off."
Karl Kraus
"In
times
of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon
as prepared for, it insists on making war."
Michael Ledeen,
Neocon
warmonger
"If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful."
C.
S. Lewis
"That the aggressor, who puts himself into the state of war with another, and unjustly
invades another man's right, can, by such an unjust war, never come to have a right over
the conquered, will be easily agreed by all men, who will not think that robbers and
pirates hhave a right of empire over whomsoever they have force enough to master, or that
men are bound by promises which unlawful force extorts from them.
Should a robber break into my house, and, with a dagger at my throat, make me seal deeds
to convey my estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title by his sword
has an unjust conqueror who forces me into submission. The injury and the crime is equal,
whether committed by the wearer of a crown or some petty villain.
The title of the offender and the number of his followers make no difference in the
offence, unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little
ones to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and
triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have
the power in their own possession which should punish offenders."
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government 1690
"The constitution
supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the
Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone
to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war
in the Legislature."
James Madison in a
letter to Thomas Jefferson
"Of all the enemies
to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it
comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of
armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and
taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the
domination of the few. No nation could preserve
its freedom in the
midst of continual warfare."
James Madison
"...(W)ars
are not made by
common
folk, scratching for livings in the heat of the day; they are made by
demagogues
infesting palaces."
H.L. Mencken
"Is a young man
bound to serve his country in war? In addition
to his legal duty there
is perhaps also a moral duty, but it is very obscure. What is called
his country is only its government and that government consists merely
of professional politicians, a parasitical and anti-social class of
men. They never sacrifice themselves for their country. They make all
wars, but very few of them ever die in one. If it is the duty of a
young man to serve his country under all circumstances then it is
equally the duty of an enemy young man to serve his. Thus we come to
a moral contradiction and absurdity so obvious that even clergymen and
editorial writers sometimes notice it."
H.L.
Mencken, in Minority
Report
"The
argument
that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine,
for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to
war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its
very nature: a few
butcheries cannot do it any further damage."
H.L.
Mencken
"Wars
will never cease until babies come into the world with larger cerebrums
and smaller adrenal glands."
H.L.
Mencken
"To
wage a war for a purely moral reason is as
absurd as to ravish a woman
for a purely moral reason."
H.L.
Mencken
"The
American
people, North and
South,
went into the {Civil} war as citizens of their respective states, they
came out as subjects...And what they thus lost they have never got
back."
H.L. Mencken
Ludwig
von
Mises
"Modern war is not a war of royal armies. It is a war of the peoples, a total war. It is
a war of states which do not leave to their subjects any private sphere; they consider
the whole population a part of the armed forces. Whoever does not fight must work for the
support and equipment of the army. Army and people are one and the same. The citizens
passionately participate in the war. For it is their state, their God, who fights."
Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government [1944]
"History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents....... A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets."
Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government [1944]Michel de Montaigne
"War makes the victor stupid and the vanquished vengeful."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Memorial Day is a day we remember and honor those who fought and often died for their country. It is fitting that we do so. It is not, however, a day that we are called on to forgive those who have brought on us the horrors of war. As a nation we are not called on to do that; as individuals, as the years pass by and memories fade some of us will. But some can never."
Lyn Nofziger
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac."
George Orwell
"War is a way of shattering to pieces ... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and ... too intelligent."
George Orwell
"If the war didn't happen to kill you, it was bound to start you thinking."
George Orwell
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it."
George Orwell
"War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil."
George Orwell
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. They do
not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing
their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-
abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand,
if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never
sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from
evil."
George Orwell, 1941
"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the
screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The
P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade
whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that
kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who wrote pamphlets against us
and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper
offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the
libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics,
the vilification of the enemy - all these were done, as usual, by people who were not
fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight... Perhaps
when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo
with a bullet-hole in him."
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
"Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of
War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no
sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn.
That is why true Poets must be truthful."
Bent double, like old beggars
under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An
ecstasy
of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my
helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein
that bleeds a nation to death."
Thomas Paine, 1783 - from The American Crisis
"War is the gambling table of governments, and citizens the dupes of the game."
Thomas Paine
"Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me
because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel
with mine, though I have none with him?"Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1660)
"...[W]ars have been used throughout modern history to justify rapid expansion of state
power at the expense of personal liberty. We cannot remain free if we allow the endless,
undeclared war on terror to serve as an excuse for giving up every last vestige of our
privacy. ... Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves what kind of society we hope to leave
our children and grandchildren. A civilized and free society would not be discussing,
much less seriously debating, any proposal to enlist private citizens to act as federal
neighborhood snitches."Rep. Ron Paul
"Freedom and prosperity cannot coexist with socialism and endless war. Yet socialism and
endless war are exactly what most in Washington are promoting."
Rep. Ron Paul
"Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control
over their own people."
Richard Perle, Neocon warmonger"No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of
Richard Perle, policy advisor to G.W. Bush, 2001
them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do
Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. That is entirely the wrong way
to go about it ... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it
entirely, and we don't try to ... piece together clever diplomatic solutions ... but just
wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well. Our children will
sing great songs about us years from now."
"When
the
tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there
is
nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or
other, in order
that the people may require a leader."
Plato
"Only the dead have seen the end of the war."
Plato
Plutarch, Life of Cleomenes
"Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the
growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents
and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of
tenacious popular resistance."
Bruce D. Porter, (1952- ) Professor of political science at Brigham Young University
Source: "War and the Rise of the State", 1994
"For
me war has become a flat, black depression
without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the
spirit."
"And so it is over. The catastrophe on one side of the world has run its course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has come at last.
I suppose emotions here in the Pacific are the same as they were among the Allies all over the world. First a shouting of the good news with such joyous surprise that you would think the shouter himself had brought it about.
And then an unspoken sense of gigantic relief - and then a hope that the collapse in Europe would hasten the end in the Pacific.
It has been seven months since I heard my last shot in the European war. Now I am as far away from it as it is possible to get on this globe.
This is written on a little ship lying off the coast of the Island of Okinawa, just south of Japan, on the other side of the world from Ardennes.
But my heart is still in Europe, and that's why I am writing this column.
It is to
the boys who were my friends for so long. My one regret of the war is
that I was not with them when it ended.
For the companionship of two and a half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce. Such companionship finally becomes a part of one's soul, and it cannot be obliterated.
True, I am with American boys in the other war not yet ended, but I am old-fashioned and my sentiment runs to old things.
To me the European war is old, and the Pacific war is new.
Last
summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a
gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits
it is easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish
themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.
But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
Dead men by mass production - in one country after another - month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.
These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference. . . ."
Ernie Pyle: On Victory in Europe, This draft was found in Pyle's pocket on April 18, 1945,
after he was killed by a Japanese machine-gunner on the island of Ie Shima.
"History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is
cheap."
Ronald Reagan
"Wars
are the hobbies of half-informed children who
have somehow come into possession of the levers of power."
"You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you
in a new way."
Will Rogers
"...[W]e live in a great and free country only because our forefathers were willing to wage war rather than accept the peace that spells destruction."
Teddy Roosevelt
Karl Rove, from 'Bush at War' by Bob woodward, p. 338
(Oh, I get it! Might makes right. How very simple! RAB)
"Death has a
tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."
(Of)fense Secretary Don Rumsfeld (I guess it's really just a light-hearted romp in the park, as long as you're safe in DC. RAB) |
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
(The 'we' he mentions must be the warmongers of the American Empire. RAB)
"Democracy is untidy. Freedom is untidy. Liberation is untidy."
Defense
Secretary
Donald
Rumsfeld
"... Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."
Carl Sandburg, (1878 - 1967)
"...(L)et us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The choice
reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of
containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been
replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of
"anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan
employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would,
lives in infamy."
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Today, It is We Americans Who Live in Infamy
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
"There may
they dig each other's graves, and call the sad work glory."
Percy
Bysshe Shelley
"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"War,
even in the best state of an army, with all the alleviations of
courtesy and honor, with all the correctives of morality and religion,
is nevertheless so great an evil, that to engage in it without a clear
necessity is a crime of the blackest dye. When the necessity is clear,
it then becomes a crime to shrink from it."
Robert Southey
"Most wars are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked
ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances."
Thomas Sowell
"During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade
often under the guise of patriotism."
Howard Thurman
"No
protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic
country."
"In
all history there is no war
which was not
hatched by the governments, the governments
alone, independent of the
interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when
successful."
"It
is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless
they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
Voltaire |
Get the bumper sticker at LibertyStickers.com! |
"Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself?
"Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? . . .
"A free
government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the
most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever
entered into the heads of men."
Daniel Webster, Speech in the House of Representatives, January 14, 1814
"The War between the States settled by force whether states could secede. Once it was established that states cannot secede, the federal government, abetted by a Supreme Court unwilling to hold it to its constitutional restraints, was able to run amok over states' rights, so much so that the protections of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean little or nothing today; Not only did the war lay the foundation for eventual nullification or weakening of basic constitutional protections against central government abuses, but it also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Dr. Walter Williams, The Real Lincoln, March 28, 2002"War creates peace like hate creates love."
David L. Wilson
"Once
lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such
a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and
the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our
national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the
beat, the man in the street."
Woodrow
Wilson, on the evening before declaring war on Germany