Voltaire Quotes

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

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

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

As barbaric is we are, it's a miracle we haven't blown ourselves off the face of the earth so far.

War is not civilized.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

Violence is man re-creating himself.

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

War itself is the enemy of the human race.

Nothing endurable can be produced on a soil soaked with blood and moved by violent agitations.

They are spinning and people are dying.

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.

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, his brain has embraced so many amazing things, and yet we're still beating each other over the heads with clubs, excepting the bullets now, one bullet can wipe out an entire city.

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

there is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day

War,--the trade of barbarians!

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

This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

People been killing each other since forever and hurting each other since forever and taking advantage of each other since forever.

Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that's why you so often want to kill each other.

Any day we create that much shrapnel is a good day.