Henry L. Stimson Quotes

Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as "foreign war"? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?

Turn on your television and see what happens when nations settle their internal differences with guns.

The hope of the world is that wisdom can arrest conflict between brothers. I believe that war is the deadly harvest of arrogant and unreasoning minds. And I find grounds for this belief in the wisdom literature of Proverbs. It says in effect this: Panic strikes like a storm and calamity comes like a whirlwind to those who hate knowledge and ignore their God.

When you scan the globe's hot spots, every civil war and massacre, every act of terror and every clash between states has its unique local circumstances.

You can't come away with this cosmic perspective thinking that you are better than others and want to fight. That's why you'll never have astrophysicists leading nations into war.

I was born into Sudan's civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.

Peace as a goal is an ideal which will not be contested by any government or nation, not even the most belligerent.

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.

Something is wanting, and something must be done, or we shall be involved in all the horror of failure, and civil war without a prospect of its termination.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

It makes twenty years or more of peace to make a man. It takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

Today, however, the world is deeply troubled everywhere and disorder seems endless. As the disasters that humankind may suffer are immeasurable, we sincerely hope to bring about a cessation of hostilities and a restoration of peace, and have therefore ordered the government to ally with Germany and Italy, nations which share the same intentions as ourselves ….

Some day, one state will take up arms against another

… what a fearful waste it is that we have to go killing each other before even a difference of opinion can be settled amongst people of the same nation.

It is true that large parts of the world have not had to endure state-to-state wars for decades. The majority of the world's nations have also been spared the scourge of civil wars, although many have known violence from revolutionary insurrection.

I have a brother; we had some good brawls.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons.

In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war.

What’s so civil about war anyway?

Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

Sadly, a prize for peace is a rarity in this world. Most nations have monuments or memorials to war, bronze salutations to heroic battles, archways of triumph. But peace has no parade, no pantheon of victory.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more.