Mark Twain Quotes

The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.

So long as peace is not attained by law (so argue the advocates of armaments) the military protection of a country must not be undermined, and until such is the case disarmament is impossible.

The Mutual Security Act was intended not to fight a war but to prevent a war.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.

From 1836, down to last year, there is no proof of the Government having any confidence in the duration of peace, or possessing increased security against war.

Where there is no trust, how can we give up our weapons first?

Security provided by peace treaties is preferable to security enforced by troops.

Deterrence is to prevent war, not to win a war.

Any idea that you can have a league for security is nuts, and all people who favor it are potential murderers… as long as man is man, there will be war and the only way to avoid trouble is to have the best army and navy, which we now have.

Shall we be defenseless America, a weak and harmless nation, or shall we be defensive America, the fear and dread of all nations?

If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament -- disarmament follows peace.

It is not important what the other side says or means. What is important are the military capabilities of the other side.

Disarmament requires trust.

Lightly armed nations can move toward war just as easily as those which are armed to the teeth, and they will do so if the usual causes of war are not removed.

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a joke - albeit a grim one. Alfred Bernhard Nobel famously invented dynamite and felt sorry about it.

We should wage war not to win war, but to win peace.

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

The American people need to tell their member of Congress that we need a strong defense to protect us and to prevent wars. We can't get away with simply leading from behind and gutting our defenses.

There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.

Peace through strength works; but the flip side is war invited by weakness.

When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.

I came here as a practical man, to talk, not simply on the question of peace and war, but to treat another question which is of hardly less importance - the enormous and burdensome standing armaments which it is the practice of modern Governments to sustain in time of peace.