One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.
War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.
The English people would never consent to go to war for a cause in which England was not manifestly interested.
Some wars have been due to the lust of rulers for power and glory, or to revenge to wipe out the humiliation of a former defeat.
World War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.
The cause of their wars is not for lust of dominion, nor of extending their frontiers, no for inordinate covetousness, but for some ancient enmity which in by-gone times arose amongst them: and when asked why they made war, they knew not any other reason to give than that they did so to avenge the death of their ancestors, or of their parents:
We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance, however remote, that we might miss an opportunity to reduce the occurrence of war.
You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.
People do not make wars; governments do.
Population pressure is the ultimate cause of every war.
The closed-door policy [to immigration] is one of the root causes of our wars.
The power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.
Special interests and the demented philosophy of conquest have driven most wars throughout history. Rarely has the cause of liberty, as it was in our own revolution, been the driving force.
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery. The state has our instincts without our restraints.
If you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962. I think this is telling. It is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons the war happened in the first place.
The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.
I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else.
Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
While there are many causes for which a state goes to war, its fundamental object can be epitomized as that of ensuring the continuance of its policy - in face of the determination of the opposing state to pursue a contrary policy. In the human will lies the source and mainspring of conflict.
The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men.
The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.
It is from the pride and ambition of rulers and the ignorance of the people that wars arise.
It is not every cause of war that should lead to war.
