Lester B. Pearson Quotes

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had Ken O'Donnell. He was ready to protect this nation, but he was not ready for a military solution just because it was being rammed down his throat.

People who start wars never know exactly how they will turn out.

Wars are to be undertaken in order that it may be possible to live in peace without molestation. Bella suscipienda sunt ob eam causam, ut sine injuria in pace vivatur.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

I think when war becomes your life, I think it's very difficult to have the proper perspective to be able to create a fully balanced policy.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago.

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

The main force used in the evolving world of humanity has hitherto been applied in the form of war.

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

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

I know that military alliances and armament have been the reliance for peace for centuries, but they do not produce peace; and when war comes, as it inevitably does under such conditions, these armaments and alliances but intensify and broaden the conflict.

It is easy to get into war, not so easy to get out.

War is the greatest failure of mankind.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

War is the most serious of the complicated relationships of humankind.

Wars are fought for political considerations. Military victory alone is never enough