Thomas Butler Quotes

Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

I think its man's nature to go to war and fight.

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

I can hardly repress our press and our people too. They are thirsting for war against England.

I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any domestic establishment.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

There can be no peace until this German spirit of Militarism is crushed.

In the present imperialistic milieu there can be no wars of national self-defense.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

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.

We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people.

War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

Now, I believe that war is never inevitable until it starts, but there has been a great proclivity in human history, and including in recent history, for war.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.