James Lee Burke Quotes

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

Nations have the tendency to be born in blood.

The only way to save our empires from the encroaching of the people is to engage in war, and thus substitute national passions for social aspirations.

The South does not understand anything but the language of the gun.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder.

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.

I do not wish a foreign army to spill the blood of my people.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

In the Middle East, a nation whose youngsters are not willing to kill and get killed for it is a nation on borrowed time. It will not last long.

An army is a nation; it is one of the vices of our age.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

Every time Germany has been unified, there has been war and suffering.

We must accept the possibility of bloodshed if we are to bring about order.

National sentiments can cause such sinful phenomena as aggressive nationalism, xenophobia, national exclusiveness and inter-ethnic enmity. At their extremes, these phenomena often lead to the restriction of the rights of individuals and nations, wars and other manifestations of violence

After all, it is not nice going to war with one’s equal or possible superior in strength – so different from those delightful “military operations” which consist in “potting”, savages with an amount of danger just sufficient to give a zest to the sport …But then the special line the skill of our ablest and most valiant generals takes is that of “thrashing a cannibal.” Thrashing a Cossack is a different sort of thing.

Every nation is a band of robbers, who prey without restraint, or remorse, on their neighbors.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

Special interests and the demented philosophy of conquest have driven most wars throughout history. Rarely has the cause of liberty, as it was in our own revolution, been the driving force.