Frederick Douglass Quotes

War is a specific product of civilization.

The Mohammadan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

War is the father and king of all.

There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter.

War is, we have been forced to admit, even in the face of its huge place in our civilization, an asocial trait.

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as "foreign war"? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?

People always make war when they say they love peace.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

We make war that we may live in peace.

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

War implies a lack of comprehension of mutual national interests; it means the undermining and even the end of culture.

History has been the history of warfare.

A bad peace is even worse than war.

Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

I was born into Sudan's civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.