Patton Oswalt Quotes

People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars.

The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.

The tactic of leading people into... a war that doesn't make any sense by telling them they are under attack, and if they raise any objection they're unpatriotic, is a very old tactic. And it doesn't intimidate me.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

When one nation is at war with another nation, the political machine does everything it can to vilify the people of the other nation, so it makes it easier to kill them. Which is understandable and it's happened this way throughout history.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valor and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war - that it is fought to be won --- has been forgotten.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Nations have been lashed unwillingly into war by high powered propaganda carried on under the supervision of swivel chair gentlemen who keep far away from the danger point in all wars, and at the same time the people have been made the victims of the wretched individuals who have made countless millions of dollars out of, so to speak, the dead flesh of the youth of the world.

It’s very easy to advocate going to war if you’re not one of the people who is going.

Never should the word peace fall from the mouths of our highest officials.... With such a country as ours, with her vast areas ... her immense natural resources, and her hundreds of millions of inhabitants, if all would prove their loyalty to their emperor and love of their country, what indeed is there to fear from any strong invader? Let us not think of making peace, nor rely solely upon diplomatic maneuvers.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

… once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

We should not need to displace the fact of their [the Iranians] bravery into categories like fanaticism and martyrdom in order to comprehend it… Governments and generals need naïve young men in order to fight for them.

Of course the people don't want war... It is the leaders...who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along...all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

There have been many examples in the world of people doing crazy things because they want to keep war going.