A. J. Muste Quotes

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.

What’s so civil about war anyway?

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 represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.

If the time comes when our culture tires of the endless homicidal feuds, despairs of the use of force and war as a means of bringing peace, becomes discontent with the half-lives that its members are living - only then will our culture seriously look for alternatives.

I think all of us are agreed that war is probably man's greatest stupidity and I think peace is the dream that lives in the heart of everyone wherever he may be in the world, but unfortunately, unlike a family quarrel, it doesn't take two to make a war. It only takes one, unless the other one is prepared to surrender at the first hint of force.

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.

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

At the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

You can’t have peace without a war.

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

Peace is the alternative to war, and nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.

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

The root of war is fear.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.

Hobbes: How come we play war and not peace? Calvin: Too few role models.

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

Even in waging war, cherish the spirit of peace-maker; that, by conquering those whom you attack, you may lead them back to the advantages of peace.

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

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

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.

Every victory accomplished with weapons is a funeral that should be mourned.

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.