Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
—Margaret Atwood
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
—Shunryu Suzuki
It’s as if to the Religious Right, any attempt to even imagine an alternative world or other realities is an offense against God.
— Rev. Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
War comes a the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.
— Adrienne Rich
Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
— Paul Valery
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
— Siegfried L. Sassoon. July 1917
The Good and Respectable would not rob a train, killing the driver, but they would make fortunes out of arms contracts, killing millions. They would not smash up a telephone kiosk, but they would send young brain-washed clods out to bomb a city.
— John Taylor Caldwell
War would end if the dead could return.
— Stanley Baldwin
If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
— Joan Baez
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
—Albert Einstein
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
—Ernest Hemingway
In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.
— Ernest Hemingway
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
— Thomas Mann
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
—John F. Kennedy
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
— Bertrand Russell
When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
The military don’t start wars. Politicians start wars.
— William Westmoreland
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
— Jeannette Rankin
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
— Major General Smedley Butler, from a speech he gave in 1933.
