...On War, State and Deception

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
(~Woody Allen)

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.
(~Brooks Atkinson)

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
(~Eugene V. Debs, 1918)

It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.
(~Robert Houghwout Jackson, Chief Judge, War-Crimes Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945)

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.
(~Donald Rumsfeld)

How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does it is murder. But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder.... Only get enough people to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?
(~Adin Ballou, 1845)

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
(~Voltaire)

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
(~Luis Bunuel)

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.
(~General Smedley Butler)

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people...
(~Leo Tolstoy)

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
(~Herman Goering)

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.
(~General Douglas MacArthur)

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
(~Thomas Pynchon)

I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.
(~Phillip Caputo)

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
(~Murray Rothbard)

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
(~Aldous Huxley)

Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat- including men--from reluctant citizens...
(~Charles Tilly)

All warfare is based on deception.
(~Sun Tzu)

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.
(~George W. Bush)

We have guided missiles and misguided men.
(~Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
(~Sigmund Freud)