Pablo Neruda Quotes

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

War would end if the dead could return.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

War is not the only arena where peace is done to death.

Mark! Where his carnage and his conquests cease, He makes a solitude and calls it-peace!

War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men.

It may seem sometimes as if a culture of peace does not stand a chance against the culture of war, the culture of violence and the cultures of impunity and intolerance. Peace may indeed be a complex challenge, dependent on action in many fields and even a bit of luck from time to time. It may be a painfully slow process, and fragile and imperfect when it is achieved. But peace is in our hands. We can do it.

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

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

War is just like bush-clearing-the moment you stop, the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop in the ground you have won at such a terrible cost.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

We cannot build on peace on blood. We are still so addicted to this lie. We have this fantasy that we honor the dead by adding to their number. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue drowns us, drowns our children, drowns our future, drowns the world. We have to understand that when we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death, we follow.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.

When adults wage war, children perish.

I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.

The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow.

Disarm, disarm. The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

It's not just the war itself. It's what you do after the war and what structure you put in place and how you make that structure work.