#militarism

He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#courage

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world. ↗

— Eugene Victor Debs

#anti-nationalism #compassion #humanity #universal-love #love

Men can, of course, be stirred into life by being dressed up in uniforms and made to blare out chants of war. It must be confessed that this is one way for men to break bread with comrades and to find what they are seeking, which is a sense of something universal, of self-fulfillment. But of this bread men die. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#militarism #self-fulfillment #men

The greatest threat to peace is the barrage of rightist propaganda portraying war as decent, honorable, and patriotic. ↗

— Jeannette Rankin

#peace #propaganda #war #propaganda

...overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. ↗

— George Washington

#military

Hand in hand with nationalist economic isolationism, militarism struggles to maintain the sovereign state against the forward march of internationalism. ↗

— Christian Lous Lange

#economic #forward #hand #internationalism #isolationism

From a very young age, militarism and trying to solve the world's problems through militarism is something that has always resonated with me as being a bad idea. ↗

— Justin Sane

#always #bad #bad idea #being #idea

We should get out of this business of empire. It is untenable. We should get out of the business of interfering in the affairs of other nations. We should get out of those lands before they kick us out. ↗

— Pat Buchanan

#militarism #militarism-war #business

if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code ↗

— Woodrow Wilson

#militarism #world-war-i #change

Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn't imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery. ↗

— Dave Eggers

#militarism #war #imagination