Oliver Goldsmith Quotes

It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

Every time Germany has been unified, there has been war and suffering.

War is never a good environment in which to run.

I've always been interested in the politics of war. War is one of those things that, the longer I studied it, the more illogical it seemed.

War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.

When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars.

I'm not pro-war. But I think war has been the dominant condition of humankind, and peace has been the anomaly - certainly sustained periods of peace that profit great masses of people - and I think war has worked, even awful hellish wars: worked to staunch fascist aggression in Europe, worked to preserve the Union after secession in the United States, etc. Not always, maybe not often, but to say never is to reject history in favor of a wishful unreality.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos.

I don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

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

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

Wars such as those which have occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

I think that war is diplomacy by other means, for sure, and there have been wars that have been fought for righteous reasons. There are wars that have had to be fought, and there will probably continue to be.

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.

The idea that democracies never make war on each other rests on very thin historical ice.

Law stands mute in the midst of arms