Cyril Joad Quotes

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 stirs in men's hearts the mud of their worst instincts. It puts a premium on violence, nourishes hatred, and gives free rein to cupidity. It crushes the weak, exalts the unworthy, and bolsters tyranny .. .Time and time again it has destroyed all ordered living, devastated hope, and put the prophets to death.

War with all its glorification of brute force is essentially a degrading thing.

It is fear which leads us to war, ... It is fear which leads us to believe that we must kill or be killed. Fear which leads us to attack those who have not attacked us. Fear which leads us to ring our nation in the very heavens with weapons of mass destruction.

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

You can’t have peace without a war.

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.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.

What’s so civil about war anyway?

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.

War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than she - yet according to ethics of nations it does. I have conquered her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is left in it belongs to my heirs and successors, forever. That is war!

War is a foolish, childish, animalistic, unthinking, unintelligent way of trying to accomplish a purpose.

The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.

People who are anxious to bring on war don't know what they are bargaining for; they don't see all the horrors that must accompany such an event.

Violence and war lead only to death.

A serious pacifist approach can't win wars against enemies whose only program is violence. That doesn't mean I think the US has fought terrorists so wisely most of the time since 9/11. But there are some enemies that need to be destroyed by force lest they destroy much much more.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.

If we had not driven them into hell... hell would have swallowed us.

Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars - all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose - there is no such war in the history of the race."

After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.

There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good.