Conflict Futility Quotes

There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

Vietnam was not a war for us to be in …. It was a useless war.

I saw that the war could not be prevented. The time had passed.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

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.

Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile.

War, like children's fights, are meaningless, pitiless, and contemptible.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.