African Proverb Quotes

Conflicts are never health for anybody.

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Baneful indeed is the scourge of war.

It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

The tongue is more to be feared than the sword.

When bulls fight, woe to the frogs.

Peace with a cudgel in hand is war.

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

The violent will not come to a natural end.

A weapon is an enemy even to its owner.

If a man smites you on one cheek, smash him on the other.

You may not like to go to war, but war will come to you.

Jesus Christ opposed with earnest eloquence the panic fears and hateful superstitions which have enslaved mankind for ages. Nations had risen against nations, employing the subtlest devices of mechanism and mind to waste, and excruciate, and overthrow. The great community of mankind had been subdivided into ten thousand communities, each organized for the ruin of the other. Wheel within wheel, the vast machine was instinct with the restless spirit of desolation.

What I have learned about Afghanistan is that force carries more weight than anything else.

Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.

There are only two means by which men can deal with one another: guns or logic. Force or persuasion. Those who know that they cannot win by means of logic, have always resorted to guns.

In nations composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the uncultured will govern because it is their habit to attack and resolve doubts with their fists in cases where the cultured have failed in the art of governing. The uncultured masses are lazy and timid in the realm of intelligence, and they want to be governed well. But if the government hurts them, they shake it off and govern 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.

Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine.

War is the supreme form of prestige.

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done.

War knows no law except that of might.

There can be no nonviolence offered by the militarily strong.