Charles Sumner Quotes

War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.

It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. They do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

War remains the decisive human failure.

When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.

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.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things.

in the clash of contending armies and amid the groans of the wounded and the dying, the interests of education are sacrificed – the pacific virtues take their flight from the earth

I don’t pray often, but on this occasion I pray devoutly that the Armies of Europe may bleed each other till they faint with the loss of blood..

The sad fact is that horrendous human conflict is nothing new.

War...is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.

War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.

War is not something that can be won. Everybody loses at war.

War is cruel to the people, and terrible to the conquered.