James Fenimore Cooper Quotes

Preventing a war is tantamount to winning a war.

The biggest difference would be made if we don't have wars to begin with.

I've worked for four presidents, and I've concluded that almost nothing is inevitable. History is to a significant extent the result of the interaction of personalities and ideas. And so I don't believe war between the U.S. and China is in any way inevitable, and it's well within the province of diplomacy and statecraft to avoid it.

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.

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

The Executive should be able to repel and not to commence war.

I consider even a victorious war as an evil, from which statesmanship must endeavor to spare nations.

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace.

When two great powers disagree about anything - it doesn't matter what - they must find a way to settle it somehow by arbitration or by negotiation, not by war or threat of war.

War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.

I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as it seemed obvious to me; and that, if once it became apparent that we were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from the abyss.

We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.

Throughout that period, Japan had made honest efforts to keep the destruction of war from spreading and, based on the belief that all nations of the world should find their places, had followed a policy designed to restore an expeditious peace between Japan and China.

For ultimately, the only way to win wars, is to prevent them occurring in the first place.

Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.

Our country has never started a war. Our sole objective is deterrence, the strength and capability it takes to prevent war.

... the greatest moral victory in the history of civilization if it actually keeps out of a war.

Borders most often result from wars or peace treaties that end wars.

All States do not have the same interests, but are there any interests which cannot be infinitely better reconciled before than after a war?

The Queen returns the enclosed draft. She has written upon it, in pencil, a passage which she thinks ought to be added, if the draft—though civil—is not to be a mere refusal to do anything for Austria, and a recommendation that whatever the Italians ask for ought to be given, for which a mediation is hardly necessary. The Queen thinks it most important that we should try to mediate and put a stop to the war, and equally important that the boundary which is to be settled should be such a one as to make a recurrence of hostilities unlikely.

… in a tense situation, if time could be given for everyone to discuss what was going on before they actually went to war, we might come to our senses. Most of us are taught as children to count to 30 before we open our mouths when we were angry, and that same lesson should apply to nations.

It is easier to begin a war than to end one, which is why the decision to start a conflict should not be entrusted to the person who wages it. Post‐war presidents have abandoned this wisdom.

Warned by the disaster of the last great war, the statesmen of all nations have been taking measures to prevent the return of another such calamity.

I don't consider myself dovish and I certainly don't consider myself hawkish. Maybe I would describe myself as owlishthat is wise enough to understand that you want to do everything possible to avoid war.

All our rulers have said that war is unthinkable, and then we think about it almost all the time. We've got to make it unthinkable.