Terry Pratchett Quotes

The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.

The violent will not come to a natural end.

… morality ends where the gun begins.

War with all its glorification of brute force is essentially a degrading thing.

War knows no law except that of might.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

We live in a world of guns, bombs and terror. To conquer hate seems a nigh-impossible task.

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.

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.

We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.

No doubt it requires two to fight. But both of them need not necessarily be fighters. It is, all the same, a fight, even if one goes on beating and the other gets beaten. There is no guarantee that others would behave properly with us even if we remain peaceful and cordial with them.

We believe in peace, but we are not pacifists. Sometimes we have to use force

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years … and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home … to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.

War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

Force should never be the first answer, but sometimes it is the only answer.

Policy is not made with papers or ceremonies. Policy is made with iron and blood.

The end of war is to procure by force the justice which cannot otherwise be obtained.

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst

I am too realistic to believe in pacifism. But, nevertheless, the use of force should always be the last resort.

War is the father of all.

The South does not understand anything but the language of the gun.