Smedley Butler Quotes

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

No one hates war like a soldier hates war.

The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

People like to talk about war.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Politicians start wars, but it's young men who wash themselves with blood because of the politicians' shortsightedness.

When the days of rejoicing are over,/ When the flags are stowed safely away,/ They will dream of another wild 'War to End Wars'/ And another wild Armistice day.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

I like war.

Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.

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

Sending our youth to war is wrong.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.

The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.

I've grown up, luckily, with only a distant relationship to war and soldiering.

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.