Pithy Sayings

War

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Destroying people, their beloved kin and their precious possessions does not bend the survivors to your will .... It produces a cry for violent retribution, somehow, somewhere.
[Guy ff Bellairs, CEng, FIEE writing in the Engineering & Technology Journal, July 2007]

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
[Samuel Johnson, 1709 to 1784]

One has to realize that the powerful industrial groups concerned in the manufacture of arms are doing their best in all countries to prevent the peaceful settlement of international disputes ...
[From The World As I See It by Albert Einstein, 1956]

That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed
[From What I believe by Albert Einstein, 1930]

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I know how the Fourth will: with sticks and stones.
[Attributed to Albert Einstein, 1879 to 1955]

International law exists only in textbooks on international law.
[Attributed to Albert Einstein, 1879 to 1955]

King Alexander the Great confronted a pirate whom he had caught. Alexander the Great asked the pirate, "How dare you molest the sea?" The pirate turned to Alexander the Great and said, "How dare you molest the world? I have a small boat, so I am called a thief and a pirate. You have a navy, so you're called an emperor."
[Described in City of God by Saint Augustine]

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.
[Attributed to Edmund Burke, 1729 to 1797]

[O]ne of the major purposes of political terror, always and everywhere, is to force the authorities to take reprisals and to become more repressive, thus alienating a portion of the population and generating sympathy for the terrorists. And the other purpose is to create unrest by destroying the population's sense of security and belief in the invincibility of the government.
[From The Turner Diaries (Second Edition) by Andrew Macdonald, 1980]

The jungle has got to belong to you; you must own it; you must control and dominate it.
[From "How Borneo was Won" by General Sir Walter Walker in The Round Table, volume 59, number 233 (1969), pages 9 to 20]

There's not much romance in knitting socks for our brave boys in the Unmanned Drone Operations Corps
[A cartoon by Bernie (Stephen Hutchinson) in Private Eye, Number 1402, 2 October 2015, page 20]

Don't cheer, boys, those poor devils are dying.
[Capt J W Philip, Santiago Bay, 1898, after setting ablaze the Cruiser Vizcaya]