John Steinbeck Quotes

There can be no peace with someone who wants to kill you.

We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, killings, of wars, or of hatred...If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?

Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate.

There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don't think you do. It's just business.

We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.

A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder.

Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

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.

Senseless violence is, almost by definition, hard to understand. Not that I can understand terrorists who kill from hate, but at least we can identify a reason - a terrifying one, to be sure, grounded in a violent belief system - for what they do. Two gangs go to war. Extremists kill in the name of belief.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

As long as there are men who would hate and destroy, we must find the courage to resist

The last time I saw you Gooks was when you were shooting at me.

It takes a certain political initiative to make people kill one another.

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world : that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

It is not a war. It is murder.

Humans can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet they're potentially more vicious than any other. They are the only ones who can be persuaded to hate millions of their own kind whom they have never seen and to kill as many as they can lay their hands on in the name of their tribe or their God.

Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?

I believe that everyone has it in them to kill another person. In desperation, or hatred, or at least to defend themselves.

You and I have never liked each other, Rose. If I’ve got to kill someone, it might as well be you.

War is murder writ large.

War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs!

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.