William Jennings Bryan Quotes

The nexus between modern science and violence is obvious from the fact that 80 percent of all scientific research is devoted to the war industry and is frankly aimed at large-scale violence.

The intellectual development of man, far from having gotten men away from war, has, rather, on the contrary, brought them to a refinement always more perfected in the art of killing. They even came to raise the methods of slaughter to the rank of "science".

From the earliest dawnings of policy to this day, the invention of men has been sharpening and improving the mystery of murder, from the first rude essays of clubs and stones, to the present perfection of gunnery, cannoneering, bombarding, mining, and all those species of artificial, learned, and refined cruelty, in which we are now so expert, and which make a principal part of what politicians have taught us to believe is our principal glory.

In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane — the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times a bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.

War is the science of destruction.

The destructiveness of war waged on the scale and with the intensity which conscript armies, the new means of transportation and communication, the new artillery, the aeroplanes, the high explosives, and the continuity of the fighting on battle fronts of unexampled length, by night as well as by day, and in stormy and wintry as well as moderate weather, make possible, has proved to be beyond all power of computation, and could not have been imagined in advance. Never before has there been any approach to the vast killing and crippling of men, the destruction of all sorts of man's structures—buildings, bridges, viaducts, vessels, and docks—and the physical ruin of countless women and children.

It were indeed to be wished that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry.

Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

Combat is a piece of war. But war is a totalizing, uncivilized experience.

War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

War is a profane thing.

Instead of a few hundreds of thousands of men meeting each other in war, millions would now meet, and modern weapons would multiply manifold the power of destruction.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

Killing is the payoff of war.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

The civil war now being inaugurated will be as horrible as his Satanic Majesty could desire.

… a war of extermination.

And this I hate—not men, nor flag nor race, But only War with its wild, grinning face.

I will allow myself to call it devilish; for this was the new war fiend, destined, along with others of the same breed, to annihilate whole navies and batter down old supremacies.

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst