War Protest Quotes

Resistance to conscription [in WWI] was quite strong. By the end of the war, the ranks of noncooperators were stunningly large. Roughly 3 million eligible men never registered, in violation of the law — compared with the 24 million who did. And some 338,000 who did register either failed to obey an induction notice or deserted after they joined the ranks .... Altogether, a higher percentage of American men successfully resisted conscription during World War I than during the Vietnam War half a century later.

No music is going to stop the war. What's going to stop the war is a large amount of body bags, or a large amount of people in the streets, protesting it before it starts.

In the sixties, during the Vietnam war, when anarchists and pacifists and socialists, Democrats and Republicans, decent-hearted Americans, all recoiled with horror at the bloodbath, we came together.

As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.

I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.'

My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War.

I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!

Mr. President, I love you, but you're wrong. (To Richard Nixon, on the Vietnam War)

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.

'Turn to Stone' was written about the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War and the protesting that was going on and all of that. It's a song about frustration. Also, I attended Kent State.

I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.

We may have government surveillance people listening in on Quaker anti-war meetings.

A lot of the idealism of the Sixties was spot on, from the environmentalism to the war to the Civil Rights movement, the women's rights movement, you name it.

Did Lincoln hate America when he voted against the Mexican War? Did Mark Twain hate America when he made speeches against the Spanish American War? If you love your country you will find ways to speak out …

I find it hard myself to feel justified to sing in a very politically direct way about war or social conditions because I feel so ignorant of a lot of it.

As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.

I think if you just made a film that says, 'This is anti-war,' and you had to spend two hours explaining that... you don't like war? Wow, that's original. Know what I mean?

I have received a commission to make a poster against war. That is a task that makes me happy. Some may say a thousand times that this is not pure art.... but as long as I can work, I want to be effective with my art.

I wouldn't say I was part of an anti-war campaign.

The things I really cared about - poverty, the Great Society, civil rights - were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: "I can't speak for a war that I believe is immoral."

Your taxes are due a week from today. You can make out your check directly to Halliburton. Or you can do what I'm going to do. I'm filing my first joint return. No, I'm not getting married, I'm sending the IRS an actual joint with a note that says, 'If you think I'm paying for this war, you must be high.'

The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.

[O]ur War of the Revolution was, in good measure, fought as a protest against standing armies.

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»

I think when we think about the judgment of someone who might want World War III, we might think about someone who might shut down a bridge because they don't like their friends.