International Socialist Conference Quotes

… a war of extermination.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

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.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

The destructiveness of war waged on the scale and with the intensity which conscript armies, the new means of transportation and communication, the new artillery, the aeroplanes, the high explosives, and the continuity of the fighting on battle fronts of unexampled length, by night as well as by day, and in stormy and wintry as well as moderate weather, make possible, has proved to be beyond all power of computation, and could not have been imagined in advance. Never before has there been any approach to the vast killing and crippling of men, the destruction of all sorts of man's structures—buildings, bridges, viaducts, vessels, and docks—and the physical ruin of countless women and children.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

What a miserable world. What colossal idiocy this war.

Daily Herald this morning described burning Berlin on Saturday night as having looked “like an oven”. I wonder who really gets the satisfaction out of this terrible deterioration in human values.

Several million ordinary folk were killed and several hundred thousand starved to death; none of my acquaintances died of hunger.

The 9 million soldiers who died in the First World War… essentially died in vain.

It was a sane, humane, and politic treaty which put an end to that horrible butchery of slaying the conquered, of giving no quarter to prisoners of war – Spanish barbarism that the patriots were forced to adopt themselves in reprisal, that had pushed back civilization, made the soil of Columbia an abode of cannibals and soaked it with innocent blood until all humanity shuddered, It was an advantage to us, fatal to the Spaniards. Their forces could only diminish; mine, augment and organize.

The sacrifices of our people were very great. Out of a population of one million, 28,000 were killed, 12,600 wounded, 10,000 were made political prisoners in Italy and Germany, and 35,000 made to do forced labor… all the communications, all the ports, mines and electric power installations were destroyed, our agriculture and livestock were plundered, and our entire national economy was wrecked.

The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war...And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.

The wounded wailing in the sun, The dead, the dust, the flies. The flies! Oh God, the flies That soiled the sacred dead, To see them swarm from dead men's eyes And share the soldiers' bread ., Nor think I now forget The filth and stench of war,.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

It's an important fact of life, war.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.