Sri Aurobindo Quotes

The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can't afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

In modern war there is no such thing as victor and vanquished... There is only a loser, and the loser is mankind.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal "peace treaties." We seem not to have thought enough about the difference between the large official events of political and military history and their overflow both into recognized effects and into the lives of unofficial people who suffer them.

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men.

Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile.

Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

Who does not know the evils of war cannot appreciate its benefits.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.

War is just what we do. Yet, of course, the effects of it are repeatedly deeper, then deeper, then deeper.

A singular fact about modern war is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men's control. Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very soil in which society's roots are nourished.

War is a matter of vital importance to the state; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied.

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

We think-although of course, now, we very seldom Clearly think- That the other side of War is Peace.

It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.