Spider Robinson 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.

From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated—ever.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

I think violence has always been popular, way before movies started being made.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.

It does not, surely, require such torrents of blood to satisfy any reasonable man that nothing can be a more impious presumption than for either side to think themselves entitled to count the Almighty as an ally in such a pitiful display of human passion.

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

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.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

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

Unless something drastic is done very soon, then bloodshed and violence are going to happen…almost inevitably… A people made desperate by despair and injustice and oppression will use desperate means.

History is a bath of blood.

War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.

The people, ever greedy for war, till they suffer by it …

The march of history is accompanied by a steady flow of bodies into the abattoir of hate.

Are we to continue to struggle, as so many good men struggled in the first dozen centuries of Christendom -- spilling oceans of blood, wasting mountains of treasure -- to achieve what is at bottom a logical absurdity, to accomplish something which, when accomplished, can avail us nothing, and which, if it could avail us anything, would condemn the nations of the world to never-ending bloodshed

What is war but your usual custom? Or what is sweeter for a brave man than to seek revenge with his own hand? It is right for nature to glut the soul with vengeance. Let us then attack the foe eagerly, for they are ever the bolder who make the attack.

Our permanent enemy is the noted bellicosity of human nature.... The plain truth is that people want war.... It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical blood-payment.

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. ..And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man"--with his mouth.

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

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

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

Look, people have been filming fights since the beginning of time.

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