Smedley Butler Quotes

Show me who makes a profit from war, and I'll show you how to stop the war.

I guess if people couldn't profit from war I don't think there would be war.

We must take the profit out of war.

The war industry people are very together; they know exactly what they want; they don't even have to talk to each other. The peace industry people are just intellectuals who are very critical of each other... Unless the peace industry is powerful, we're always going to have war. It is as simple as that.

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

Take the profits out of war.

The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.

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

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.

Wars are most often won by those who have made the greatest effort to prevent them.

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace.

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.

Our primary objective must be to prevent wars, and when we fail in this, we must protect and assist the innocent victims.

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.

When we analyze this war in a materialistic way and ask when is it going to end and who will be the winner and the loser, it means that we do not see the endgame.

I don't think you can perpetrate war crimes with defensive weapons, with air defense systems.

Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

As a result of the World War and of a peace whose imperfections and risks are no longer denied by anyone, are we not even further away from the great aspirations and hopes for peace and fraternity than we were one or two decades ago?

You have indeed done much since the new century began to give shape and substance to the growing, the insistent desire that war may be banished from the earth.

War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.

All the vested interests and people who profit by war will - with the journals they control - resolutely oppose any reduction of armaments.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business.

I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves.