Franz Grillparzer Quotes

War destroys, kills, impoverishes. Lord, give us your peace!

What’s so civil about war anyway?

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

Whence comes war and fighting, and factions? Whence but from the body and the lust of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the same and service of the body.

War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

We say peace and the echo comes back from the other side, war. We dont want wars even when we win.

They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people.

War crushes with bloody heel all justice, all happiness, all that is Godlike in man. In our age there can be no peace that is not honorable; there can be no war that is not dishonorable.

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

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

We're not going to cure terrorism and spread peace and goodwill in the Middle East by killing innocent people, or I'm not even saying our bullets and bombs are killing them. The occupation that they don't have food. They don't have clean water. They don't have electricity. They don't have medicine. They don't have doctors.

I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

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

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

The cry of the poor for bread has been answered by warheads!

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture …

Once again the hopes of people of two nations are being smashed by weapons in the name of eliminating weapons. Let us abolish weapons of mass destruction at home. Joblessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Hunger is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Poor health care is a weapon of mass destruction. Discrimination is a weapon of mass destruction.

We know from our own history, and that of our neighbors, that where conflicts and disagreements are not resolved peacefully, the suffering and bloodshed that follows and the collapse of economic and social development leads to tragic consequences.

Every year, I hear about Thanksgiving. Who do one give thanks to? ... And who is giving thanks? What are they giving thanks for? For lots of poverty that's on the earth and lots of war that is a-rumoring all over the earth? For lots of people who die daily and the crime that multiply?

The sad fact is that horrendous human conflict is nothing new.

It is a conviction that war is not an answer to human conflict any more than cannibalism is an answer to human hunger.

All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

There is no man, and no place, without war. The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get - who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.