Joseph Sobran Quotes

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.

People say you favor assassination, what do you think war is? Except that it's assassination on a much larger scale, a much more horrific scale.

It's a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other. It's just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one's really listening.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

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

War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.

...In little more than a single century from 1820 to 19450, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another.... We describe these killings as men behaving "like animals," but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.

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.

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

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

I think its man's nature to go to war and fight.

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.

The history of mankind is a history of war.

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

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 is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

Warfare is an utterly stupid method of settling differences of interest between different nations.

First and foremost arms are tools in the service of rival nations, pointing at the possibility of a future war.

It goes without saying that when survival is threatened, struggles erupt between peoples, and unfortunate wars between nations result.

We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.

Nations make wars; states make wars; and cultures make wars. We tend to conflate the three, but they are very different wars.

We have lived a long time.... without war... We have had peace when all the world has been in arms... It is … a thing most horrible that we should engage ourself in war with another.... With our own venom... we will destroy ourself.

The normal state of mankind is war and peace is an aberration.