Scott Westerfeld Quotes

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.

If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.

We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles.

Gold begets in brethren hate; Gold in families debate; Gold does friendship separate; Gold does civil wars create.

All these wars are similar in the way ideology is being used. It's the ideology of so-called humanitarian intervention. We don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the sake of the people who live there. This is, of course, a terrible sleight of hand because all sorts of people live there, and, by and large, they do it to help one faction and not the other.

A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet.

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace! – but there is no peace.

Realize that war is common and justice is strife, and that all things come into being and pass away through strife.

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men By strangers with a calm, judicial pen, And when the borders bleed we watch with dread The lines of ink across the map turn red.

Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures.

I'm in a war, a cultural war.

War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.

Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.

We want peace with all our hearts. But peace cannot be achieved through weakness.

Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

I have a deep sympathy with war; it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

An organism at war with itself is doomed.

Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.

Little brother, I don’t mean to be a downer, but we’re talking about War here. There’s no way to mitigate damages. He won’t let us. I was there with twenty-five Chthonians to fight him and he spanked our hides like we were Lemurian slave women. Two of us had our hearts ripped out and shoved down our throats while he laughed, then he licked the blood clean from his fingers and came at the rest of us. (Savitar)

People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians- meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.

Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.