Charles Eliot Norton Quotes

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

The nation is too brave, too strong, too powerful, and too just to engage in an unrighteous and precipitate war.

Miseram pacem vel bello bene mutari. Even war is preferable to a shameful peace.

I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience... War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does not come out of some instinctive human need. It is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort--by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion--to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war.

If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.

Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.

If we fix it so's you can't make money on war, we'll all forget what we're killing folks for.

As the war was just in its origin and necessary and noble in its objects, we can reflect with a proud satisfaction that in carrying it on no principle of justice or honor, no usage of civilized nations, no precept of courtesy or humanity, have been infringed.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice.

Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

It is the object only of war that makes it honorable.

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.

You have to be willing to sacrifice as much to prevent war, as soldiers are willing to sacrifice to wage war.

[...] to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity

The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.

I will never conduct a war or start a war because we want to; the United States of America should only go to war because we have to. And if you live by that guidance, you'll never have veterans throwing away their medals or standing up in protest.

Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable?

I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war.

If a war be undertaken...before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.

To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.

I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree that fighting the Nazis was a good thing.