Steven Pinker Quotes

War's a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.

Each year, about 45 million people are affected by war. Three hundred thousand people die looking down the barrel of a gun - and 200,000 of these are killed in countries ostensibly at peace.

I have need of Rigaud. He is violent. I want him for carrying on war; and that war is necessary to me.

War? War is an organized bore.

In the United States alone, we spend seven times as much on war as on education. There's something wrong there. On this Memorial Day, we should certainly honor those who have died at war, but we should dedicate this day, not so much to their memory, but to the search for a way to end the idiocy of the wars that killed them.

If we have to go to war, we will.

We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.

Usually when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood.

Deep in the winter plain, two armies Dig their machinery, to destroy each other. Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave On either side, except the dead, and wounded.

Little did we guess that what has been called the century of the common man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries together in the history of the world.

I think war is a dangerous place.

For WAR, consisteth not in Battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to content by Battle is sufficiently known.... So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.

Sure Vietnam is a dirty war. I've never heard of a clean one.

The history of mankind is a history of war.

And the blood of brave men was shed like unto the shedding of rain from a black cloud.

Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?

The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.

Either we're going to solve this by realistic negotiation or there will be blood on the border.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

Every time I come to the States, I wish people would react to war like they react to tobacco, for example. Because war really kills in a second lots of people, thousands of people.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

We hear so much about weapons of mass destruction. But nine out of 10 war victims are killed by guns. It's the AK-47 that's a weapon of mass destruction.