Terry Pratchett Quotes

Any idea that you can have a league for security is nuts, and all people who favor it are potential murderers… as long as man is man, there will be war and the only way to avoid trouble is to have the best army and navy, which we now have.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

Isn't it strange how the leaders of nations can talk so eloquently about peace while they prepare for war? ... There is no way to make peace while preparing for war.

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars - all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose - there is no such war in the history of the race."

War is only caused through the political intercourse of governments and nations - war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

One would think that man would run out of wars.

For WAR, consisteth not in Battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to content by Battle is sufficiently known.... So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.

War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment.

War is the trade of Kings.

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.

From a very young age, militarism and trying to solve the world's problems through militarism is something that has always resonated with me as being a bad idea.

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.

War is failure of diplomacy.

It is easy to get into war, not so easy to get out.

Our national aims can be realized only by military means. The matter needs no further elaboration or interpretation.

The Commonwealth of Venice in their armoury have this inscription, "Happy is that city which in time of peace thinks of war.

Must we conclude that no enlightened self-interest will ever impel nations to look on intervals of peace as other than periods of recuperation for war? I, for one, think not.

War may well be the worst way imaginable to create larger, more peaceful societies, but the depressing fact is that it is pretty much the only way.

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace.