Elihu Root Quotes

War can be avoided, and it ought to be avoided. I want no war.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Preventing a war is tantamount to winning a war.

All States do not have the same interests, but are there any interests which cannot be infinitely better reconciled before than after a war?

War is evitable if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.

Number one, that it is smart to communicate and negotiate with your enemy instead of just waging war with bombs and weapons of mass destruction.

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

If the inner world is inundated with peace, then the nightmare of world war cannot even come into being.

The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.

We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

There has not been a war in South America for fifty years, and I have every confidence that the countries of Central and South America are deeply in earnest in the maintenance of peace.

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.

Throughout that period, Japan had made honest efforts to keep the destruction of war from spreading and, based on the belief that all nations of the world should find their places, had followed a policy designed to restore an expeditious peace between Japan and China.

Every time that we've ever fought, we fought to keep from bein' destroyed. We've never started a war.

There has never been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man is the greatest protection against war.

I have done all I can to prevent wars. All my life I've been dedicated to preventing just what has happened today.

There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

Moreover, war has become a thing potentially so terrible and destructive that it should have been the common aim of statesmen to put an end to it forever.

But I feel convinced, and I venture even to prophesy in this regard, that the time will come when there will also be a minister of peace in the cabinet, seated beside the ministers of war.

Nobel was a genuine friend of peace. He even went so far as to believe that he had invented a tool of destruction, dynamite, which would make war so senseless that it would become impossible. He was wrong.

To increase the zone of peace is to build the inner core of a stable international zone.

The best way to solve problems and to fight against war is through dialogue.