Quotes About Cruelty Of War

“Does this darkness have a name? This cruelty this hatred. How did it find us, did it steal into our lives or did we seek it out and embrace it? What happened to us that we now send our children into the world like we send young men to war, hoping for their safe return but knowing some will be lost along the way. When did we lose our way? Consumed by the shadows swallowed whole by the darkness. Does this darkness have a name ... is it your name?”

— Lucas Scott

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders ... and millions have been killed because of this obedience ... Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves ... (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.”

— Howard Zinn

“From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism. That is where it draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest for action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty towards internal opponents. Anyone who does not join in the game is regarded not as an adversary but as a spoilsport. Ultimately that is also the source of Nazism's belligerent attitude towards neighboring states. Other countries are not regarded as neighbors but must be opponents, whether they like it or not. Otherwise the match must be called off!”

— Sebastian Haffner

“Mexico has made a mistake. Alone, it fights a war against a global phenomenon that only matters to a few. That makes the headlines in every case because of its unusual cruelty.”

— Sabina Berman

“Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other's souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.”

— Jillian Lauren

“When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.”

— Mary Doria Russell

“Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children, because stress sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviors. Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Many world leaders who have been disciplined through anger and cruelty go in to treat their own people abominably, or to bully other nations. As long as we continue to discipline children like this, we will continue to have terrible wars on both the family and the world stage. One very powerful study illustrates the point. Researchers tracked down Germans who, in World War II, risked their own lives by hiding a Jewish person in their house. When interviewed, the researchers found one common feature of all these people. They had all been socialized in ways that respected their personal dignity.”

— Margot Sunderland

“Sometimes, of course, the war required that he be cruel, but what cause worth fighting for did not require cruelty of its champions once in a while?”

— Clive Barker

“Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking toward Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People traveled with them.”

— Terry Pratchett

“Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

“I don't inflict horrors on readers. In my research, I've uncovered truly terrible documentations of cruelty and torture, but I leave that offstage. I always pull back and let the reader imagine the details. We all know to one degree or another the horrors of war.”

— Alan Furst

“War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.”

— Gilbert Parker

“Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.”

— Meir Kahane

“If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.”

— William Tecumseh Sherman

“But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”

— George W. Bush

“To say that I wished I wasn't there would be a ludicrous understatement, but I'd only ever had the illusion of choice: We have to do this, Hank had said. It's for Ellis. To refuse would have been an act of calculated cruelty. And so, because of my husband's war with his father and their insane obsession with a mythical monster, we'd crossed the Atlantic at the very same time a real madman, a real monster, was attempting to take over the world for his own reasons of ego and pride.”

— Sara Gruen

“You can walk around this culture now, as a proud supporter of the so called anti-war movement and it's made up of a lot of people I used to know ... I'd like for them to be asked more often than they are, if your advice had been taken over the last 15 or so years; Slobodan Milosevic would still be the dictator of not just Serbia but also of a cleansed and ruined Bosnia and Kosovo. Saddam Hussein would still be the owner of Kuwait as well as Iraq, he would of nearly have doubled his holding of the worlds oil. The Taliban would still be in charge of Afghanistan. Don't you feel a little reproach to your so called high principle anti-war policy? Would that really have led to less violence, less cruelty?”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Tolerance of Cruelty in any form is a degraded state of mind and soul. When we freely allow the massacre and prolonged torture of defenseless creatures, it increases our receptivity to human cruelty and war and steals our humanity, peace and soul. Very little speeds and greases your way to Hell, like animal cruelty.”

— Russell Boyd

“War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.”

— C. E. M. Joad

“The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying, cruelty-all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public acclaim.”

— John T. Flynn

“The case against vivisection is the same as that against war and all other forms of cruelty - that violence does not produce long-term solutions.”

— Jon Wynne-Tyson

“When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted
anything!
the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women
or anyone
as chattel or inferior beings.”

— Katha Pollitt

“Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.”

— Rose Macaulay

“War should we waged without love of violence, cruelty, or enmity.”

— Saint Augustine

“Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.”

— Elie Wiesel

“It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.”

— Erich Fromm

“It is cruelty in war that buyeth conquest.”

— Philip Sidney

“There was a generation of kids who were just kind of emulating distant heroes and wearing peace symbols, and parents who were thinking of themselves as liberal and removed from barbarity, but it also was the era of Vietnam. I very much was influenced - and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock - for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war.”

— Wes Craven

“It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Look at World War II, at Hitler's cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.”

— Mao Zedong

“Wars, therefore, are to be undertaken for this end, that we may live in peace, without being injured; but when we obtain the victory, we must preserve those enemies who behaved without cruelty or inhumanity during the war.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero