Simone Weil Quotes

You believe you are dying for the fatherland—you die for some industrialist.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

Of course the people don't want war... It is the leaders...who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along...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 in any country.

There are those who wrap themselves in flags and blow the tinny trumpet of patriotism as a means of fooling the people.

For all we have and are, For all our children’s fate, Stand up and take the war. The Hun is at the gate!

Naturally the common people don't want war ... but after all, it is the leaders of a 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. Voice or no voice, the 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 in every country.

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.

You can't get any more patriotic than dying for the country.

In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties. Compulsory military service seems to me the most disgraceful symptom of that deficiency in personal dignity from which civilized mankind is suffering today.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

The only important thing I have to say is that my father never fought against his country.

It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.

The tactic of leading people into... a war that doesn't make any sense by telling them they are under attack, and if they raise any objection they're unpatriotic, is a very old tactic. And it doesn't intimidate me.

If you make a decision to fight for future of your own country you have to consider all the consequences.

When one nation is at war with another nation, the political machine does everything it can to vilify the people of the other nation, so it makes it easier to kill them. Which is understandable and it's happened this way throughout history.

The whole thing was done for internal political reasons to galvanize and unify the country against the Americans, and if they hadn't had that immediate opportunity they would have found another one.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Each had defended his own country; the Germans Germany, the Frenchmen France; they had done their duty.

Every country in every war fights for freedom.

I am not ordering you to fight for your country. I am ordering you to die for your country!

Any great war must be a popular movement.

Patriotism ... for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. ... Patriotism is slavery.