Robert M. La Follette Quotes

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

If this phrase of “the balance of power” is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting …

It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don't know why they were fired into Kuwait.

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.

Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.

When one nation is at war with another nation, the political machine does everything it can to vilify the people of the other nation, so it makes it easier to kill them. Which is understandable and it's happened this way throughout history.

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

A rational fear of an imminent danger is said to be a justifiable cause of war.

The Senate is rushing to vote on whether to declare war on Iraq without pausing to ask why. Why is war being dealt with not as a last resort but as a first resort?

… once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

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.

If Japan had been near to either England or France, war would have broken out long ago.

Governments go to war directly or by proxy without declaring war. Force, or threat of force, are constantly used to dominate other countries.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

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

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.

As international support for Obama's decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.

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

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

Now, I believe that war is never inevitable until it starts, but there has been a great proclivity in human history, and including in recent history, for war.

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went.