Bertrand Russell Quotes

It is folly to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another. For, in a larger sense, it is war itself which is immoral.

Peace and stability cannot be achieved by means of nuclear weapons.

Nothing can justify war.

War is a racket. It always has been... A few profit - and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The arms race is one of the greatest curses on the human race and the harm it inflicts on the poor is more than can be endured

Show me who makes a profit from war, and I'll show you how to stop the war.

This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind.

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

Deterrence itself is not a preeminent value; the primary values are safety and morality.

Morality is contraband in war.

The war industry people are very together; they know exactly what they want; they don't even have to talk to each other. The peace industry people are just intellectuals who are very critical of each other... Unless the peace industry is powerful, we're always going to have war. It is as simple as that.

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

Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade. We see it in the suffering of civilian populations trapped by armed conflict or pervasive crime. We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians - including children, the most vulnerable of all.

We have a moral imperative to keep up the search for something better than mutual assured destruction.

It is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the people and with their ... representatives.

The trading of arms is disgusting and contributes to horrors around the world.

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

War is a racket.... The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription of the nation's manhood.... Let the officers and directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munitions makers and shipbuilders all be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to our lads in the trenches. Give capital 30 days to think it over and you will learn by that time there will be no war. That will stop the racket—that, and nothing else.

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in it's potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

Armament firms have been active in fomenting war scares and in persuading their own countries to increase their armaments.

We are calling for a ban on weapons deliveries to countries listed as human rights violators, to governments that are engaged in wars of aggression, military occupation, and annexation and spend more money on weapons than on education and health care.

The urgent moral priority of our time is to dismantle the warfare state, disarm the nukes, roll back the empire from every corner of the globe. We want to live in a country even a crazy man can head and not have it be dangerous for us or the world.

In this age which boasts of its atomic power it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice.

In the age when the atom has been split, the moon encircled, diseases conquered, is disarmament so difficult a matter that it must remain a distant dream? To answer, yes, is to despair for the future of mankind.

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won.