Hermann Hesse Quotes

As I watch what is happening in the Middle East and the carnage that comes over our television screens every evening, I cannot help but ask myself, what is wrong with humankind that we cannot stop the killing?

It's such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street.

Morally it makes no difference whether a person is killed in war or condemned to starve by the indifference of others.

For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out.

I know a lot of people will talk crap at me, but they can say whatever they want.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.

Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena.

You who feel no pain at the suffering of others It is not fitting for you to be called human.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

They will tell you that the Americans who sleep in the streets and beg for food got there because they’re all lazy or weak of spirit. That the inner-city children who are trapped in dilapidated schools can’t learn and won’t learn and so we should just give up on them entirely. That the innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes half a world away are somebody else’s problem to take care of.

Poverty and War have no excuse.

War destroys, kills, impoverishes. Lord, give us your peace!

Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool, hateful to living things. So the follower of the Way stays away from it. Weapons are unhappy tools, not chosen by thoughtful people, to be used only when there is no choice, and with a calm, still mind, without enjoyment. To enjoy using weapons is to enjoy killing people, and to enjoy killing people is to lose your share in the common good. It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented. It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

No spoon has yet destroyed a mouth, but the knife of war cuts portions that are hard to swallow. Perhaps the big mouths of the privileged are able to cope with them, but they dull the teeth of the little people and ruin their stomachs.

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry...I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America...Everything else is swept away.

The public be damned.

War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.

That's one of the horrors of war, that you can train a person, train them to hate, train them to kill. It's a terrible thought.

Violence and war lead only to death.

If it's true, why do they leave us to live like this? With the hunger and the killings and the Games?" And suddenly I hate this imaginary underground city of District 13 and those who sit by, watching us die. They're no better than the Capitol.