Alan Bennett Quotes

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.

The principal cause of war is war itself.

There have been many examples in the world of people doing crazy things because they want to keep war going.

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

War and preparations for war have acquired a kind of legitimacy.

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

We are a Nation of peace and compassion, yet these people have and will devote every fiber of their beings to the destruction of Americans and our Country.

Now, I believe that war is never inevitable until it starts, but there has been a great proclivity in human history, and including in recent history, for war.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

War... some people glamorise war and glorify war. It's not nice, from whatever point of view you come from.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

I can hardly repress our press and our people too. They are thirsting for war against England.

Fascism means war.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

[Theodore Roosevelt] came down here [Washington DC] looking for war. He did not care whom we fought as long as there was a scrap.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.

The people, ever greedy for war, till they suffer by it …