Clarence Darrow Quotes

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

Anyway, there were more after the war than before.

The war changed everybody's attitude. We became international almost overnight.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

President Obama knows that wars are not to be entered into lightly; he knows that overseas conflicts don't only do damage in the land in which they are fought, but in the land of those who fight them, as well.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.

We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal "peace treaties." We seem not to have thought enough about the difference between the large official events of political and military history and their overflow both into recognized effects and into the lives of unofficial people who suffer them.

War is a dangerous teacher and physical victory leads often to a moral defeat.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.

The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

War brings out thieves and peace hangs them.

War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.