Violence & War

African proverb - The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

Margaret Atwood paraphrase - Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Raymond Aron (1962) - [Le terrorisme] est une action de violence dont les effets psychologiques sont hors de proportion avec les résultats purement physiques.

Roy Baumeister (in Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, 1999) - Violent people are an important but distinct, atypical minority of people with high self-esteem. The most potent recipe for violence is a favorable view of oneself that is disputed or undermined by someone else — in short, threatened egotism.

Isaiah Berlin - What people evidently adore (...) is being slaughtered together for some unintellegible ideal.

Georges Bernanos - On ne massacre jamais que par peur.

Bertold Brecht - Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat. English: Pity the country that needs heroes.

Hedley Bull - Violence is not war unless it is carried out in the name of a political unit. Equally, violence carried out in the name of a political unit is not war unless it is directed against another political unit.

Jean-Louis Bourlanges - La guerre est la façon la plus bête de dépenser de l’argent. 

Bryan Caplan (2010) - If you tell people that the skies will fall if their country doesn’t fight, they believe it – even though the worst case scenario is usually the loss of some territory most people can’t even find on a map.

Thomas Carlyle - The second edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work was bound in the skin of those who laughed at  the first.

Jimmy Carter (Nobel Peace Prize lecture, 2002) - In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents.

Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart - We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose.

Sir Winston Churchill (in My Early Life: A Roving Commission, 1930) - The Statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Carl von Clausewitz (in On War, 1832) - Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.

Carl von Clausewitz (in On War, 1832) - Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.

Boris Cyrulnik - C’est au nom de la morale, c’est au nom de l’humanité qu’ont été commis les pires crimes contre l’humanité. C’est au nom de la morale qu’ont été commis les pires crimes immoraux.

Boris Cyrulnik - Tous les totalitarismes se déclarent en état de légitime défense. Il leur paraît normal et même moral de tuer sans honte ni culpabilité.

Pierre Desproges (in Manuel de savoir-vivre à l'usage des rustres et des malpolis) - L'ennemi est bête : il croit que c'est nous l'ennemi, alors que c'est lui !

Karl Deutsch - A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.

John Foster Dulles (1956) - The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art . . . if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.

Eugène Etienne (ancien Ministre de la Guerre ) en 1911 - Éliminer le pantalon rouge ? Jamais ! Le pantalon rouge, c'est la France.

Benjamin Franklin (in Poor Richard’s Almanack) - Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

Benjamin Franklin (letter to Jane Mecom, Nov. 1, 1773) - If you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you.

Azar Gat (in War in Human Civilization, 2006) - Contrary to popular ideas, herbivores fight among themselves no less, and sometimes more, viciously and frequently than carnivores. 

Jonathan Haidt - Two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism . (…) The major atrocities of the 20th century were carried out largely by men who thought they were creating a Utopia.

Seymour Halleck (1966) - In frontier societies or under conditions of relative lawlessness, the psychopath has a higher survival potential than many other individuals. Even in the prison or mental hospital many psychopaths have the capacity to create a comfortable niche for themselves.

Sir Michael Howard (1973) - Whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on now, they have got it wrong. I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What does matter is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet. 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (in Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 1822) - Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr. (History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history. Français : L’histoire n’est pas le terrain du bonheur ; car les périodes de bonheur sont pour l’histoire des pages vides.)

Heinrich Heine (in Almansor) - Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. (That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.)

Hobbes (in Leviathan, 1651) - Bellum omnium contra omnes.

Hobbes (in Leviathan, 1651) - (...) time of Warre where every man is Enemy to every man; (...) no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

Aldous Huxley - Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

Henry Kissinger (on the Irak-Iran war) - It is a shame there can only be one loser.

Paul Krugman (quoted by Steven Landsburg, 2003) - World War II was fought inefficiently. The British bombed the Germans and the Germans bombed the British; think how much airplane fuel they could have saved by agreeing that each side would bomb itself instead. Better yet, they could both have agreed to act as if they’d been bombed and forgone the actual bombing altogether.

Steven Landsburg (2003) - The reason there are wars in the first place is that one side or the other is overconfident. After all, if everyone agreed on the expected outcome, there would be no need to fight the war—we could just jump to the conclusion. 

Konrad Lorenz - What directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the ‘eating enemy’ but the competitor.

Konrad Lorenz - The danger of too dense a population of an animal species settling in one part of the available biotope and exhausting all its sources of nutrition and so starving can be obviated by a mutual repulsion acting on the animals of the same species, effecting their regular spacing out (...). This is the most important survival value of intra-specific aggression.

Louis XIV (lors de la fonte de son mobilier d'argent) - La guerre est un art qui détruit tous les autres.

David Lykken (in The Antisocial Personalities, 1995) - We could avoid two thirds of all crime simply by putting all able-bodied young men in cryogenic sleep from the age of 12 through 28. 

Andrei S. Markovits - If anti-Semitism had been exclusively—or even just primarily—a German phenomenon rather than the established common property of Europe that it was, the Nazis would never have received so much support for their genocide from the populations of those countries occupied by or allied with them.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder - No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

George Orwell (1943) - Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.

Blaise Pascal (in Pensées, 1669) - L’ homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’Ange fait la bête. (English: The more we try to be angels, the more we become beasts.)

Matthew Ridley (in The Rational Optimist, 2010) - Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace."

Lord Salisbury - I think that the constant study of maps is apt to disturb men’s reasoning powers.

A.J.P. Taylor (in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918) - No war is inevitable until it breaks out.

Charles Tilly - War makes the state and the state makes war. 

Traditional - One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

Robert Zajonc (2000) - Genocide is not the plural of homicide.  Massacres are social phenomena fed by “moral imperatives”.