Susan Sontag Quotes

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

War is an act of force, and to the application of that force there is no limit. Each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and a reciprocal action results which in theory can have no limit.

War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

War's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.

Turn on your television and see what happens when nations settle their internal differences with guns.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

What’s so civil about war anyway?

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life.

I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.

War is a foolish, childish, animalistic, unthinking, unintelligent way of trying to accomplish a purpose.

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk about abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.

Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.

We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.

After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

Look at you in war...There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war.

War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.

War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

It is fear which leads us to war, ... It is fear which leads us to believe that we must kill or be killed. Fear which leads us to attack those who have not attacked us. Fear which leads us to ring our nation in the very heavens with weapons of mass destruction.

Il est plus facile de faire la guerre que la paix. It is far easier to make war than to make peace.