Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

I am a peace man except when I wish to fight.

War is no more inevitable than the plague is inevitable. War is no more a part of human nature than the burning of witches is a human act.

Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

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.

War: A by-product of the arts of peace.

There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again

No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all intercourse of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another's throats without hatred. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

War was forced upon mankind in his original civil and social condition.

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.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

Fighting is not a man's thing, it is a human thing.

The idea that democracies never make war on each other rests on very thin historical ice.

Like individuals, some peoples are naturally pacific and some naturally aggressive.

If we must fight, then by God we will fight. And I hope they [the Croats and Bosnians] will not be so crazy as to fight against us. Because if we don’t know how to work well or to do business, at least we know how to fight well.

We are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.

The spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men and to extinguish those inflammable humors which have so often kindled into wars.

The belief that war is inevitable makes of war a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.