Karl Shapiro Quotes

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?

Wars--and what is war except crime on a mass scale?--destroy rather than produce. The vandal that destroys a window causes not only the owner to bear the costs of replacing it, but costs those whom he planned on using that money to buy from. The same goes for wars. The warlords--of war and peace--destroyed so much, not only what existed, but all those new things that could have existed, if only individuals were left in peace.

Why is war such an easy option? Why does peace remain such an elusive goal? We know statesmen skilled at waging war, but where are those dedicated enough to humanity to find a way to avoid war

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war. We must all do our share, that we may be equal to the task of peace.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree that fighting the Nazis was a good thing.

I feel like war should occur only for the most vital and necessary reasons, and only then.

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.

Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.

Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.

Whenever you have a possibility of going in two ways, either for peace or for war, for peaceful methods of for military methods, in the present age there is a strong prejudice for the peaceful ones. War seldom ever leads to good results.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring.

Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.

To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need of our civilisation.

The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'.

Giving peace a chance only gives Saddam Hussein more time to prepare for war on his terms, at a time of his choosing, in pursuit of ambitions that will only grow as his power to achieve them grows.

The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?

You wait for the war to happen like vultures. If you want to help, prevent the war. Don't save the remnants. Save them all.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.

War is the greatest plague that can afflict mankind... Any scourge is preferable to it.