Harry Emerson Fosdick Quotes

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

Starvation and disease are the original weapons of mass destruction. When you burn fields and kill animals, people are left vulnerable.

War is horrible because it strangles youth.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

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

We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands.... Is not Life miserable enough, comes not death soon enough without resort to the hideous enginery of War? People of the U.S.! Your rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity! Why sleep you thoughtless on its verge, as though this was not your business?

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

War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod.

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture …

I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.

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

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

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.