Smedley Butler Quotes

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

Many powerful people don't want peace, because they live off war.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true.

War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.

The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate', are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans', to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses.

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

Let's face it, war in its essence is another form of capitalism.

War what is it good for? It's good for business.

Im sick and tired of old men sitting around in air conditioned rooms here in Washington, dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Armament firms have been active in fomenting war scares and in persuading their own countries to increase their armaments.

The munitions manufacturers and the war lords are in the saddle.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

Like all wars, conflicts bring on great opportunities for business.

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

Everything on this earth right now is about labor and slavery. War is the only American export left that anyone wants to buy.

This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.

I just want people to see what I deem as a war for no reason, but only for greed.

If we fix it so's you can't make money on war, we'll all forget what we're killing folks for.