Joan Baez Quotes

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Setting aside human rights and international law to have an agenda of war and killing and occupation to me is totally unacceptable.

When you go to war, it’s very important to kill the right people

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now & with somebody & and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.

War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can.

If we can kill Saddam, we should.

We as Americans believe it's OK to kill people. We believe it's OK to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We think it's OK to invade a country where we think Osama Bin Laden is and he's in the other country. So we just go in and we just kill. And we have the death penalty; we sanction it.

Obama is making a choice now that will lead to the deaths of many thousands of civilians in Afghanistan by American hands. By ordinary standards of presidents, he is a decent man. But those standards aren't good enough. He's in a position either to kill or not to kill, and he's made the decision to kill.

Morality is contraband in 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.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

War is failure of diplomacy.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

You cannot be politically correct in a war.

I have fought for many years. I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die.

Law stands mute in the midst of arms

All wars are tragedies, but not all wars are sins.

… the financial cost of a [military] strike isn’t a reason to acquiesce in mass murder in Syria.

The law "thou shalt not kill" has thus come to prevail among the individuals of a civilized state. It does not prevail among nations because our national mind still finds advantage in killing men of other nations and is heedless of the disadvantages to ourselves.

Bombing Syria will achieve nothing.

I've never understood why anyone would want to join the army, but that's irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that, as long as we go on voting in governments who are prepared to take troops into an illegal war, that army is a necessity.

Testimony of all ages forces us to admit that war is among the most dangerous enemies to liberty, and that the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches of Power.

War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.