Ambrose Bierce Quotes

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions - like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.

It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace, and the people whom they represent, with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs, urging them forward to war.

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

When one nation is at war with another nation, the political machine does everything it can to vilify the people of the other nation, so it makes it easier to kill them. Which is understandable and it's happened this way throughout history.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Any great war must be a popular movement.

In a war, as indeed at most times, we become the ready victims of phrases.

I can hardly repress our press and our people too. They are thirsting for war against England.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.

The unnecessary result of wartime hysteria.

Waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country’s elites.

I do not want to lead an army of mercenaries.

In time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

There is no passion to which the rulers of a people can address themselves with greater [political] effect [than war.]

All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

My patriotism and my conscience required me to support it and to engage in the debate over whether and how to fight it.

Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. "Yes," they will say, "wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold." But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.

Long live eternal Germany!