John Dos Passos Quotes

Food is as important to armies as ammunition—but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.

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

If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds. The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can't go on with this bloody business.

There has been no crime committed by statesmen of this character without those statesman appealing to the nations' honour. We fought the Crimean War because of our honour. We rushed to South Africa because of out honour. The Right Hon. Gentleman (Sir Edward Grey) is appealing to us today because of our honour. What is the use of talking about coming to the aid of Belgium, when, as a matter of fact, you are engaging in a whole European War which is now going to leave the map of Europe in the position it is in now?

People are becoming more bestial on both sides – and the full weight of responsibility for this rests on that party, which in the name of socialism blasphemously sanctified the cold-blooded execution of unarmed prisoners, which hypocritically protests against whiteguard executions in Finland while Russian soil is being drenched in the blood of the victims of firing squads.

With the use of religious and patriotic formulas, statesmen may sleep amidst the wreck of nations.

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

Remember that everybody signed up as fast as they could in World War I because they thought the war would be over by Christmas.

Nationalism ... is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.

In time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.

I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

Gosh, I think faith is a wonderful thing. And I even think religion's a wonderful thing. I know a lot of people want to say, 'Religion's the only reason that man has had any trouble at all,' but you know what? World War I and World War II were not fought because of religious reasons.

The propagandistic American 'media' and the crazed neoconservatives have set humanity on the path to destruction.

A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

It's the lack of humanity in the human psyche that haunts me. The hypocrisy. How people as a group can take something like tolerance and contort it into a new form of intolerance and conformity. The way humanity can justify any kind of evil.

We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, killings, of wars, or of hatred...If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?

War seems to me to be a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press

The man who is always waving the flag usually waives what it stands for.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

Patriotism: The first resort of a scoundrel.

I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.

It is nothing but fanaticism and beautiful soulism to expect very much (or even, much only) from humanity when it has forgotten how to wage war.

Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.

I am a misanthrope yet utterly benevolent.

When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.