Edna Ferber Quotes

My opposition to war was not because of the horrors of war, not because war demands that the race offer up its very best in their full vigor, not because war means economic bankruptcy, domination of races by famine and disease, but because war is so completely ineffective, so stupid. It settles nothing.

From a very young age, militarism and trying to solve the world's problems through militarism is something that has always resonated with me as being a bad idea.

Indeed; peace literature is almost exclusively read, though to good effect, by pacifists, while what is needed is the canvassing of those who have not so far been won to the cause.

Now were it up to me, I would abolish all warfare.

In this hope, among the things we teach to the young are such truths as the transcendent value of the individual and the dignity of all people, the futility and stupidity of war, its destructiveness of life and its degradation of human values.

Nobody's ever tried the peace thing, ... We are selling it like soap.

We don't want wars even when we win.

We're trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks. And it's the only way to get people aware that peace is possible, and it isn't just inevitable to have violence. Not just war - all forms of violence.

When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, it loses its social perspective.... There is something about a war like this that makes people insensitive. It dulls the conscience. It strengthens the forces of reaction, and it brings into being bitterness and hatred and violence.

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development, for economic and political justice and for violence control.

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

If you take guns away from legal gun owners then the only people who would have guns would be the bad guys. Even a pacifist would get violent if someone were trying to kill him or her. You would fight for your life, whatever your beliefs. You'd use a rock or tear one of these chairs out of the floor. Hey, maybe I've been watching too many Bruce Willis movies!

Make it plain that you have no time for war, that you have more important things to do....let the diplomats and marshals of the earth shoot each other.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

I abominate war as Unchristian. I hold it the greatest of human crimes. I deem it to involve all others,--violence, blood, rapine, fraud; everything that can deform the character, alter the nature, and debase the name of man.

It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. They do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.

The way I'm going now is to focus on peace, to create peace. As Sister Corita said, "I don't go to anti-war rallies. I go to peace rallies."

I have received a commission to make a poster against war. That is a task that makes me happy. Some may say a thousand times that this is not pure art.... but as long as I can work, I want to be effective with my art.

War is the suicide of humanity because it kills the heart and kills love.

I'm against war. Always have been, always will be. And everything connected with it, is anathema to me. I have never considered it necessary.

We have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part ... Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! ... We pay the first cost on all human life.

Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.

My life has been devoted to arms, yet I look upon war at all times, and under all circumstances, as a national calamity to be avoided if compatible with national honor.

Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.