Leo Tolstoy Quotes

As an Englishman, particularly as an Englishman standing upon foreign soil, I am, of course, prepared to argue that every war we have ever fought was a purely defensive war. But I am obliged to take cognizance of the quite simple historical fact that for about one thousand years, since the time indeed when Norwegians ravaged our coasts and a certain Scandinavian landed at Hastings in 1066, every war we have fought happens to have been fought in other people's countries. Now if defense means merely keeping burglars out of the house, what were we doing on all those occasions in other people's houses?

A rational fear of an imminent danger is said to be a justifiable cause of war.

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.

They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others.... It is assumed that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage in the last resort goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker goes to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.

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.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.

The only way to save our empires from the encroaching of the people is to engage in war, and thus substitute national passions for social aspirations.

The government assures the people that they are in danger from the invasion of another nation, or from foes in their midst, and that the only way to escape this danger is by the slavish obedience of the people to their government. This fact is seen most prominently during revolutions and dictatorships, but it exists always and everywhere that the power of the government exists.

All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.

We still give the nation state the monopoly on the legal use of violence in our own defense.

Politics is the womb in which war develops.”

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

The United States is proud of her remoteness from the old world, her freedom from entanglement in its quarrels, her isolation. Yet in her relatively very short history as an independent state she has fought at least six foreign wars while her troops have landed on foreign soil on nearly a hundred occasions. Not one of those wars was for the purpose of defending American soil.

Europe is to be the scene of the most terrible war she has witnessed since the Fall of the Roman Empire… The blame must fall on Germany. She could have stayed the plague had she chosen to speak in Vienna as she speaks when she is in earnest. She has not chosen to do so.

A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

And, you see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

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.