Doris Lessing Quotes

I have lived through the best years of this country's history. The next generations are going to see war and social calamities. I am glad I don't have to live on into them.

Poverty and War have no excuse.

Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

We are muddled into war.

The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil.

Why turn this country into an armed camp?

The possession of highly developed armed forces by small nations is disastrous in all its consequences.

Civil wars tend to spread to neighboring countries. That’s what history shows.

Some day, one state will take up arms against another

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war--when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.

Those men that are so remissly governed that they dare take up arms to defend or introduce an opinion, are still in war, and their condition not peace, but only a cessation of arms for fear of one another, and they live as it were in the precincts of battle continually.

The drama can only be brought to its climax in one of two ways -- through the selective brutality of terrorism or the impartial horrors of war.

You have to decide in advance whether you're ready go to war. If you guys are ready to send a million troops into Ukraine and fight World War III, you're going to do it without my support because I think that's a really foolish notion.

The possibility of a war under the current circumstances is not far-fetched and there is some evidence for that.

My sentence is for open war.

One war, such as that of our Revolution, is enough for one life.

As long as we have all these conflicts, it is the women who will continue to suffer, so that is one reason why I guess as women we should really work for peace, because we know how painful wars can be to us and our daughters.

I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

Syria will remain a hotbed of terrorism as long as the civil war, aided and abetted by the Iranians and the Russians, continue.

With the shock of war the state comes into its own again.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

When your life has been spent in one war after another for forty-five years, you have to be pretty handy to survive.