Voltaire Quotes

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

World history is tragic.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

It's a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other. It's just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one's really listening.

That cause was one of the worst for which men have ever fought..

The march of history is accompanied by a steady flow of bodies into the abattoir of hate.

The soldier's lot is the most melancholy relic of barbarism (next to capital punishment) that lingers on among mankind.

If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.

I'm fascinated by what people will do to each other. Actually, I'm sort of interested in the gory details of life.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

History is a bath of blood.

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motive.

War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things.

They gathered together without any other counsel, and without any amour saving with staves and knives, and so went to the house of a knight dwelling thereby, and brake up his house and slew the knight and the lady and all his children great and small and brent his house. And they then went to another castle, and took the knight thereof and bound him fast to a stake, and then violated his wife and his daughter before his face and then slew the lady and his daughter and all his other children, and then slew the knight by great torment and burnt and beat down the castle. And so they did to divers other castles and good houses; and they multiplied so that they were a six thousand, and ever as they went forward they increased, for such like as they were fell ever to them, so that every gentleman fled from them and took their wives and children with them, and fled ten or twenty leagues off to be in surety, and left their house void and their goods therein. These mischievous people thus assembled without captain or amour robbed, brent and slew all gentlemen that they could lay hands on, and forced and ravished ladies and damsels, and did such shameful deeds that no human creature ought to think on any such

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history

What I would like to emanate from the darkness of this tragedy is one spark of life. I mean, the realization that crime does not begin when you murder people. Crime begins with propaganda, even if such propaganda is for a good cause. The moment propaganda turns against another nation or against any human being, evil starts.

They are spinning and people are dying.

War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.