War Hysteria Quotes

All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.

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

I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.

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.

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.

I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawai'i now and putting them in concentration camps.

I think everyone's kind of just whistling and pretending everything's OK. At the heart of this is the cover-up, and the misleading the country to war in Iraq. And quite honestly, I don't think Republicans actually did a particularly good or sophisticated job, but I think everybody wanted to be fooled. I remember being on the Bill Maher show talking about how ridiculous this was before the invasion. And, you know, a lot of people, even Democrats, had been so easily thrown into this fear frenzy that they lost common sense.

The media that's having this hysterical reaction to James Mattis retiring is the same media in many cases, the same politicians in many cases, who cheered our nation into a war in Iraq that turned out to be a catastrophe.

I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were 'German dogs.' They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' “Chuck him out, the brute!” But it's “Saviour of 'is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.

It is inappropriate for the Bush administration to trump up a case in which we are ballyhooed into war.

[Describing England:] In the year 1796, the alarm of an apprehended French invasion reached a great height. The [government cabinet] ministers were suspected, and not without reason, of fomenting this alarm, for the sake of strengthening their popularity, and keeping up the national frenzy against the French republicans, which was now beginning to flag.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

It is ... necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them.

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.

People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.