Martin Landau Quotes

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.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

It does not just happen. It is disclosed by science that practically one-half of trained intellectual resources are being mobilized for murderous purposes.

War is a perversion of sex.

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atom bomb.

The intellectual development of man, far from having gotten men away from war, has, rather, on the contrary, brought them to a refinement always more perfected in the art of killing. They even came to raise the methods of slaughter to the rank of "science".

From the earliest dawnings of policy to this day, the invention of men has been sharpening and improving the mystery of murder, from the first rude essays of clubs and stones, to the present perfection of gunnery, cannoneering, bombarding, mining, and all those species of artificial, learned, and refined cruelty, in which we are now so expert, and which make a principal part of what politicians have taught us to believe is our principal glory.

Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than of war.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

War is the science of destruction.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

Why do people want to kill and maim and pillage? We're all in it together.

The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.

The world is too violent right now.

War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

War itself is the enemy of the human race.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

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.

War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things.

After all, it is not nice going to war with one’s equal or possible superior in strength – so different from those delightful “military operations” which consist in “potting”, savages with an amount of danger just sufficient to give a zest to the sport …But then the special line the skill of our ablest and most valiant generals takes is that of “thrashing a cannibal.” Thrashing a Cossack is a different sort of thing.