Gerald Nye Quotes

War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

War is a racket. It always has been... A few profit - and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

Show me who makes a profit from war, and I'll show you how to stop the war.

Nations have been lashed unwillingly into war by high powered propaganda carried on under the supervision of swivel chair gentlemen who keep far away from the danger point in all wars, and at the same time the people have been made the victims of the wretched individuals who have made countless millions of dollars out of, so to speak, the dead flesh of the youth of the world.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

The only neutral parties in a war are those who are making money from it.

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

War is good business Invest your son

The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.

That is the best Government, which best provides for war.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.

All the vested interests and people who profit by war will - with the journals they control - resolutely oppose any reduction of armaments.

They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war.

You could tell that America was gearing up for war.

When I was growing up, it was 'Communists'. Now it's 'Terrorists'. So you always have to have somebody to fight and be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, guns, and bullets and everything.

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

Take the profits out of war.

War is a racket.... The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription of the nation's manhood.... Let the officers and directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munitions makers and shipbuilders all be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to our lads in the trenches. Give capital 30 days to think it over and you will learn by that time there will be no war. That will stop the racket—that, and nothing else.

Endless money forms the sinews of war. Nervi belli pecunia infinita.

No soldier starts a war—they only give their lives to it. Wars are started by you and me, by bankers and politicians, excitable women, newspaper editors, clergymen who are ex-pacifists, and Congressmen with vertebrae of putty.

... a caricature of Mr. Military Industrial Complex.