Benjamin Spock Quotes

We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

From a very young age, militarism and trying to solve the world's problems through militarism is something that has always resonated with me as being a bad idea.

If mankind hated war, there would be millions of us and only two soldiers.

You have not been mistaken in supposing my views and feeling to be in favor of the abolition of war.

We want no war. We’ll have no war.

If you use weapons of war to bring about peace, you're going to have more war and destruction.

We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war.

War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men.

I think an appeal to arms and to brute force is unbecoming the age in which we live. Would to God that the time had come when there should be no war, and that religion and peace should reign throughout the world.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.

I don't think there's any way that war can have a place in peace. I think that peace is the active and difficult resistance to the temptation of war; it is the prerogative and the obligation of the injured. Peace is something that has to be vigilantly maintained; it is a vigilance, and it involves temptation, and it does not mean we as human beings are not aggressive. This is a mistaken way of understanding non-violence.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

Could the peaceable principle of the Quakers be universally established, arms and the art of war would be wholly extirpated: But we live not in a world of angels...I am thus far a Quaker, that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket and thank Heaven He has put it in my power.

One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.

There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?

Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.

Nothing can justify war.

I am, on principle, opposed to war and in favor of peace because I regard peace as a positive good and war as a positive evil.

I am against all war.

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.