Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

The most fundamental paradox is that if we're never to use force, we must be prepared to use it and to use it successfully. We Americans don't want war and we don't start fights. We don't maintain a strong military force to conquer or coerce others. The purpose of our military is simple and straightforward: we want to prevent war.

For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war. We must all do our share, that we may be equal to the task of peace.

You cannot stop big wars if you carry on little wars yourselves.

Preventing a war is tantamount to winning a war.

If you don't want war, then you had better be an advocate for diplomacy with muscle.

You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

I am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it for America so long as I am able. . . . No course of my choosing or of their (nations at war) will lead to war. War can come only by the wilful acts and aggressions of others.

It is the responsibility of all of us to remind governments of their commitments to settle disputes by peaceful means and to negotiate in good faith under the UN Charter, and to denounce war agitation particularly by the media.

My opposition to war was not because of the horrors of war, not because war demands that the race offer up its very best in their full vigor, not because war means economic bankruptcy, domination of races by famine and disease, but because war is so completely ineffective, so stupid. It settles nothing.

If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner's dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure.

Peace is hard work and we must not allow people to forget it.

The one thing I don't understand is war.

I consider even a victorious war as an evil, from which statesmanship must endeavor to spare nations.

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

I'm perfectly willing to say no more Iraqs, which means no more unilateral starting of the war on false claims, false information, and a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the situation in the region.

A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.

My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.

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

Today the real test of America's power and wisdom is not our capacity to make war but our capacity to prevent it. Prevention must be our overriding objective. It can be done. Surrendering to the inevitability of combat only paves the way for its occurring.

Lightly armed nations can move toward war just as easily as those which are armed to the teeth, and they will do so if the usual causes of war are not removed.

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

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 Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.