Ernest Hemingway Quotes

War seldom enters but where wealth allures.

The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery. The state has our instincts without our restraints.

We all want peace. Unfortunately, there are times when peace must be defended by fighting terror and tyranny.

We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war.

The principal cause of war is war itself.

Through the stupidity and ineptitude of old men in the chancellories of Europe, and there are still a lot of doddering old men over there in positions of power, along with a sorry lot of confirmend megalomaniacs, egomaniacs, and psychopaths, who are literally preparing to dip their hands in blood and drag the whole world into the frightful mess they are creating for themselves.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything, I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The Ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more disputes in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves.

We make war that we may live in peace.

Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.

One of the cardinal causes of war, in the opinion of the present writer, is the fact that national leadership frequently falls to men of abnormal makeup.

It is from the pride and ambition of rulers and the ignorance of the people that wars arise.

Every nation prepares, through its government, to equip itself with the power to hurl death upon its fellow-nations. No people seeks that power; it is governments that seek it.

What right have the rulers of nations to unsheath the sword of destruction, and to let loose the demons of desolation upon mankind, whenever caprice or pride, ambition or avarice, shall prescribe?

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so

Indeed, it is unnecessary to do more than point out that the worst danger of cataclysm in a capitalist society is the danger of war arising out of imperialism born of the union of capitalism and nationalism.

I don't think that humankind is worthy of trust when we can't let go of war, draw borders between neighboring countries, seek to become richer than others, find joy in defeating others at sports, and choose someone of the opposite gender based on their appearance.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

The object of war is victory; that of victory is conquest; and that of conquest preservation.