Jackson Browne Quotes

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life.

The root of war is fear.

War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than she - yet according to ethics of nations it does. I have conquered her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is left in it belongs to my heirs and successors, forever. That is war!

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war.

War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday living. We precipitate war out of our daily lives; and without a transformation in ourselves, there are bound to be national and racial antagonisms, the childish quarreling over ideologies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and all the many brutalities that go to create organized murder.

None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.

To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.

From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated—ever.

The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

War is no more inevitable than the plague is inevitable. War is no more a part of human nature than the burning of witches is a human act.

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.

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.

You can’t have peace without a war.

Man is the only animal that deals in that atorcity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind.

Pacifism in the face of war is not only irresponsible - it is immoral. Refusing to meet force with force in the name of peace will beget not peace, but further death and destruction, the very violence the pacifists seek to avoid.

We love action and adventure, but we use it to go out and start wars and kill people.

I am totally against the war but violence is part of mankind and it's going to happen, but as musicians I think we've got to step up and say 'come on'.

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

What’s so civil about war anyway?

People who talk about peace are very often the most quarrelsome.