Doris Lessing Quotes

The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate', are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans', to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses.

Again and again, Americans have voted for a president to keep them out of a war, only to see the "peace" candidate elected who then brings the nation into war.

Presidents are afraid to lose wars. They're afraid to be outflanked on the right by the militarists. They don't want to be seen as soft on either communism or soft on terrorism or whatever. So presidents are constantly tugged away from their domestic commitments to foreign policy.

War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.

In the Second World War, they're talking about the Japanese traitors and putting them into concentration camps. But companies like DuPont had factories in Germany turning out stuff for the German Army.

In today’s America the working class is paid to fight wars that the powerful would never risk.

I don't think we should be in the business of proliferating arms sales just to protect our industrial base.

The merchants of death have provided jobs for centuries, but that's no reason to continue it.

Armament firms have been active in fomenting war scares and in persuading their own countries to increase their armaments.

There is only one war I am interested in making—making war against the private munitions makers the world over.

There are many who say in effect that public opinion has little to do with war, that it is explained by the influence of the vested interests who profit by it — armament makers or groups of capitalists. But even when we have admitted that those interests do exert great influence, it only pushes the question further back. Why are the mass of men, millions, powerless in this matter as against a tiny minority … who profit by the general disaster? There are undoubtedly some who say to the millions in effect: "We should like you to go to war because it would expand our profits." But why do the millions obey?

We have been compelled to create an armaments industry of vast proportions.

The only neutral parties in a war are those who are making money from it.

War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.

War is a barbaric tool of the war profiteers and Empires who employ them. War pits young people from the working class against other similarly poor, or disadvantaged humans, for nothing but the greed of the few. Only we the people can make war obsolete by not participating in the profound crimes of the profiteers and other war mongers.

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

In the middle of the last century there was a reason to go to war. This time around the war was a really bad idea and I think the only people that benefited from it were Halliburton and people that made money from it, but that's not an excuse to have a war. Killing American kids so Halliburton can make money is not a righteous reason to go to war.

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

In the end the privatisation of war is not acceptable. We shouldn't be issuing these sub-contracts to these contracting companies because the people who run them are making millions. There should be no relationship between ex-politicians and them, like John Reid and Malcolm Rifkind, who are now associated with contracting companies having been ministers of defence. That's unacceptable.

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

If we fix it so's you can't make money on war, we'll all forget what we're killing folks for.

war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the public.