Alexandra Fuller Quotes

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

The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

At the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

Without armaments peace cannot be kept; wars are waged not only to repel injustice but also to establish a firm peace.

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

Their peace and their war Are like wind and storm. War grows from their peace.

War stirs in men's hearts the mud of their worst instincts. It puts a premium on violence, nourishes hatred, and gives free rein to cupidity. It crushes the weak, exalts the unworthy, and bolsters tyranny .. .Time and time again it has destroyed all ordered living, devastated hope, and put the prophets to death.

War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

No one wins a war. It is true, there are degrees of loss, but no one wins.

Of course, let us have peace, we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties ... " There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes." Do they ever make more sense? "No.

Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.

After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

It is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one.

One war only breeds another.

When people go at war they cheapen things.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

I've not lived one single day of peace in Colombia, and 90 percent of people here say the same thing. We have gotten used to living in a war - we don't even react to massacres.

War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.

Nobody welcomes a war - not if they're smart. But war finds everyone sooner or later. It's inevitable.

A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.

There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.