Samantha Power Quotes

Any great war must be a popular movement.

There is no passion to which the rulers of a people can address themselves with greater [political] effect [than war.]

Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions - like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.

Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

Restrain our citizens from embarking individually in a war in which their country takes no part …. How desirable, then, must it be in a Government like ours to see its citizens adopt individually the views, the interests, and the conduct which their country should pursue, divesting themselves of those passions and partialities which tend to lessen useful friendships and to embarrass and embroil us in the calamitous scenes of Europe.

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

When the state does go to war ... so too should the nation.

At the Imperial Conference on December 1, it was decided to make war against England and the United States.

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.

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

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

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace, and the people whom they represent, with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs, urging them forward to war.

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.

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

We are a nation at war - and we should act like it.

The London I entered was a great bustling metropolitan city at war, an imperial power fighting to hold on to that empire. And the teeming colonial subjects of that empire did not, on the whole, want England to lose that war, but they also did not want the empire to emerge unchanged from it. This, for very many of us, was the hard dilemma.

Nothing binds a people to their leader like a common enemy. Voters don't change governments during war.

I think the reaction to a World War II situation would be the same today as it was in 1942. Initially, people would question, but once patriotism got stirred up, the whole thing would gather momentum and we'd all pull together.

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

Foreign policy can be the undoing of absolute rulers, tempted to foreign adventure in order to compensate for failure at home or spurred on by domestic adulation.

In a war, as indeed at most times, we become the ready victims of phrases.

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

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.

The only way to save our empires from the encroaching of the people is to engage in war, and thus substitute national passions for social aspirations.