Niall Ferguson Quotes

War's a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.

It's a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other. It's just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one's really listening.

How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy. How beautiful it is to kill and be killed.

As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.

the function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.

I have touched more men that I can count. Some with my lips, more with my axe.

Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.

The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together, we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.

The history of mankind is a history of war.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.

War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

You live by the gun and knife, and die by the gun and knife.

War is about dead people.

People say you favor assassination, what do you think war is? Except that it's assassination on a much larger scale, a much more horrific scale.

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

Killing is the payoff of war.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

You give us the mission, we can get ‘em. We’ll rout ’em out. When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.

Wars ruin armies.

Killing, and nothing else, is what the army is for, and the only thing it can properly build is killers and killees.

We Beate the Savages outt of the Island burned their howses Ransaked their Temple Tooke down the Corpes of their deade kings from out of their Toambes And caryed away their pearles.... The Salvages still contineweinge their mallice Ageinste us.

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, / The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

The intellectual development of man, far from having gotten men away from war, has, rather, on the contrary, brought them to a refinement always more perfected in the art of killing. They even came to raise the methods of slaughter to the rank of "science".

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.