Emily Greene Balch Quotes

Preventing a war is tantamount to winning a war.

I have done all I can to prevent wars. All my life I've been dedicated to preventing just what has happened today.

War, which remains an anomaly in a civilized world, has taken on so devastating and universal a character...that every thought and every effort should be aimed, above all, at making it impossible.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.

Each one of these treaties is a step for the maintenance of peace, an additional guarantee against war. It is through such machinery that the disputes between nations will be settled and war prevented.

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.

For some years I have spent my time on exactly these questions - both in thinking about ways to prevent war, and in thinking about how to fight, survive, and terminate a war, should it occur.

War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

The advance guard in the campaign for peace that America wages today must be the State Department.

We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.

There has not been a war in South America for fifty years, and I have every confidence that the countries of Central and South America are deeply in earnest in the maintenance of peace.

For ultimately, the only way to win wars, is to prevent them occurring in the first place.

Yes, peace can and must be won, to save the world from the terrible destruction of World War III.

These measures may not constitute an absolute guarantee of peace, but, in my opinion, they constitute the greatest preventive measures ever adopted by nations.

The primary, the fundamental, the essential purpose of the United Nations is to keep peace. Everything it does which helps prevent World War III is good. Everything which does not further that goal, either directly or indirectly, is at best superfluous.

It is to be observed that every case of war averted is a gain in general, for it helps to form a habit of peace, and community habits long continued become standards of conduct.

I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.

One of the great advances of our time is the recognition that one of the ways to prevent war is to deter it by having the will and the capacity to use force to punish the aggressor.

To insist on strength ... is not war-mongering. It is peace-mongering.