top of page
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more War quotes

"How very like humans to pervert a message of love and peace to make it into an ideology of war and oppression to serve their own ends."

"That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians."

"In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch."

"Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go."

"War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it."
Explore more quotes by Blaise Pascal

"Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world."

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

"Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us."

"Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good."

"Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion."

"It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false."

"If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!"

"The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble."

"Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary."

"Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones."
bottom of page