James L. Petigru Quotes

If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.

We enjoin it for the commission of sins, that ... the most powerful of the nobles should vigorously gird themselves to oppose the multitude of the infidels who are now rejoicing in the victory they have gained over us ... by so much spilling of your father's blood.

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

All the gods are dead except the god of war.

This actual question of 'Why does God allow war?' is not considered or raised as such in the Bible at all.

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.

We cannot, if we would, delude ourselves about the true state of this dreadful contest. It is a religious war.

Sectarianism, bigotry, and it's horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful Earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

The count of Gilles with the remaining Franks, made an attack upon them [the Saracens] and killed an innumerable multitude. All the others fled in confusion. Our men moreover, returning in victory and bearing many heads fixed upon pikes and spears, furnished a joyful spectacle for the people of God.

To go to war against the Turks is to resist God who punishes our iniquities through them.

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.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

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

No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ.

War is a profane thing.

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

Man's idea of God, and a God's collusion, is an essential part of the equation to wage war.

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.