Gilbert Parker Quotes

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

War is not civilized.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

War is the science of destruction.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

We are muddled into war.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

War is the business of barbarians.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

War is an abstraction.

War is at its best barbarism.

… a war of extermination.

War is no damn football game.

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.

Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.

From the earliest dawnings of policy to this day, the invention of men has been sharpening and improving the mystery of murder, from the first rude essays of clubs and stones, to the present perfection of gunnery, cannoneering, bombarding, mining, and all those species of artificial, learned, and refined cruelty, in which we are now so expert, and which make a principal part of what politicians have taught us to believe is our principal glory.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

War is not a thing one wants.

War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.

War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

War is a profane thing.

Instead of a few hundreds of thousands of men meeting each other in war, millions would now meet, and modern weapons would multiply manifold the power of destruction.

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

Accursed be he that first invented war.