Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. ..And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man"--with his mouth.

Brother will kill brother, Spilling blood across the land...

The stars whirled above us and the firecrackers blazed. The moon stood watch as drops of blood fell, careless seeds that sizzled in the snow.

Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as "foreign war"? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

There's a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don't get in touch with.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

As barbaric is we are, it's a miracle we haven't blown ourselves off the face of the earth so far.

The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together, we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.

Why do people want to kill and maim and pillage? We're all in it together.

Violence is man re-creating himself.

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

Killing is the payoff of war.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother... We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

His passion has aroused the best and the beast in man. And the beast waited for him in the kitchen.

War is the most serious of the complicated relationships of humankind.

Hate breeds violence.

The people, ever greedy for war, till they suffer by it …

In truth, I do not recollect in all the animal kingdom a single species but man which is eternally and systematically engaged in the destruction of its own species.

When men cease to fight — they cease to be — Men

Our permanent enemy is the noted bellicosity of human nature.... The plain truth is that people want war.... It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical blood-payment.

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.