Paul Virilio Quotes

The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war.

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

The high level of the technologies used during the Gulf War makes this conflict quite unique, but the very process of de-realization of the war started in 1945. War occured in Kuwait, but it also occured on the screens of the entire world. The site of defeat or victory was not the ground, but the screen.

In this age of remote-controlled pushbutton war, we must all try very, very hard to remain human beings.

Strange, isn't it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.

The fate of war is to be exalted in the morning, and low enough at night! There is but one step from triumph to ruin.

War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society.

Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.

George W. Bush has deliberately polarized and divided America for political purposes, politicizing the most basic questions of war and peace for partisan advantage.

The automation of warfare has, then, come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.

Syria is already in the grips of a civil war, unfortunately enough, and Egypt is moving in that direction. We would like to see the Egyptian people avoid this fate.

Tanks are new and special weapon-newer than, as special, and certainly as valuable as the airplane.

Virtually every war fought since the Act of Union had gone badly at some stage, but before 1783 none had ended in defeat. Nor would any major war in which Britain was involved after this date end in defeat. Those who are curious about this country's peculiar social and political stability probably need look no further than this for essential cause.

Presidents are afraid to lose wars. They're afraid to be outflanked on the right by the militarists. They don't want to be seen as soft on either communism or soft on terrorism or whatever. So presidents are constantly tugged away from their domestic commitments to foreign policy.

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.

If we want to cure the things that threaten life, limb and even survival, we need to heal our sick political system. That is, not just to address our physical ailments, but the things that determine whether we're going to survive into the next century. That is war, climate change, poverty, etc. We've got to fix our politics.

I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.

William R. Polk discusses the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon [ Bonaparte] and other cases where the conflict turns into a political war, and the invader, who usually has overwhelming power, loses because they can't fight the political war.

There is a destiny in war, to which a brave man knows how to submit with the same courage that he faces his foes.

The United Sates has much to offer the third world war.

In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it's seen as mere science fiction. It's cold, hard, metallic reality.

The affairs of war, like the destiny of battles, as well as empires, hang upon a spiders thread.