Smedley Butler Quotes

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

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

To me, all war is failure for humanity, though it often is a bounty for commerce.

War and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.

Stored today in the arsenals of the most enlightened Christian nations are enough bullets to kill every man, woman and child on earth.

When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

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

A hospital alone shows what war is.

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.

No one really wants to send their kids off to die for oil.

War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

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

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.

We must take the profit out of war.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse than it ever was, the wars across the earth are worse than they ever were.