War Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Georges Clemenceau,
Albert Einstein,
Dwight D. Eisenhower,
John F. Kennedy,
Will Rogers
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| John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war. |
| - Isaac Asimov |
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| All the arms we need are for hugging. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Draft beer; not people. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| What this planet needs is more mistletoe and less missile-talk. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how? |
| - Joan Baez |
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| War would end if the dead could return. |
| - Stanley Baldwin |
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| No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war. |
| - Ambrose Bierce |
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| Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war. |
| - Otto von Bismark |
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| A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. |
| - Napoleon Bonaparte |
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| The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. |
| - Omar Bradley |
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| The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. |
| - Omar Bradley |
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| War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with. |
| - Lois McMaster Bujold |
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| I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we're subjected monthly. Maybe that's why men declare war - because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis. |
| - Brett Butler |
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| Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? |
| - Thomas Carlyle |
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| One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one. |
| - Agatha Christie |
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| Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. 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. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'. |
| - Sir Winston Churchill |
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| I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war. |
| - Georges Clemenceau |
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| War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory. |
| - Georges Clemenceau |
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| War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military. |
| - Georges Clemenceau |
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| Where is the indignation about the fact that the United States and Soviet Union have accumulated thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world? |
| - Norman Cousins |
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| War is a game which were their subjects wise, kings would not play at. |
| - William Cowper |
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| The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery. |
| - Clarence Darrow |
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| War is never a solution; it is an aggravation. |
| - Benjamin Disraeli |
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| I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. |
| - Albert Einstein |
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| Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. |
| - Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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| The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without. |
| - Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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| We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. |
| - Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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| There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. |
| - Havelock Ellis |
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| We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide. |
| - Havelock Ellis |
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| The refuge of the morally, intellectually, artistically and economically bankrupt is war. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. |
| - Abraham Flexner |
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| I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it. I hate war, and never again will I sanction or support another. |
| - Harry Emerson Fosdick |
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| All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration? |
| - Benjamin Franklin |
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| Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood. |
| - Mahatma Gandhi |
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| What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? |
| - Mahatma Gandhi |
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| You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon. |
| - David Lloyd George |
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| Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history. |
| - Pieter Geyl |
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| As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of exalted characters. |
| - Edward Gibbon |
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| It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passions, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace. |
| - André Gide |
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| I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. |
| - Ulysses S. Grant |
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| Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals. |
| - Joseph Heller |
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| Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. |
| - Ernest Hemingway |
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| They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. |
| - Ernest Hemingway |
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| War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man. |
| - Napoleon Hill |
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| The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council. |
| - Homer |
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| Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. |
| - Herbert Hoover |
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| War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals. |
| - Charles Evans Hughes |
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| A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been. |
| - Victor Hugo |
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| 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 |
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| I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures? |
| - Thomas Jefferson |
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| Dress it as we may, feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it, what is war, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform? |
| - Douglas Jerrold |
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| You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech. |
| - Franklin P. Jones |
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| Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. |
| - John F. Kennedy |
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| The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution. |
| - John F. Kennedy |
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| War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. |
| - John F. Kennedy |
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| There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. |
| - Barbara Kingsolver |
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| No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time. |
| - Henry Kissinger |
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| The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums. |
| - Arthur Koestler |
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| We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage. |
| - James Russell Lowell |
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| War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. |
| - Thomas Mann |
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| War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill? |
| - Guy de Maupassant |
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| I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. |
| - George McGovern |
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| It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate. |
| - George McGovern |
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| The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war. |
| - George Meredith |
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| War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. |
| - John Stuart Mill |
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| We kill because we are afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we'd have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong. |
| - Henry Miller |
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| War hath no fury like a noncombatant. |
| - Charles Edward Montague |
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| If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons. |
| - Pope John, II Paul |
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| Will... the threat of common extermination continue?... Must children receive the arms race from us as a necessary inheritance? |
| - Pope John, II Paul |
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| A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. |
| - German Proverb |
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| War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered. |
| - Thomas de Quincey |
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| I couldn't help but say to Mr. Gorbachev, just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We'd] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together. |
| - Ronald Reagan |
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| I think war might be God's way of teaching us geography. |
| - Paul Rodriguez |
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| Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country. |
| - Bertrand Russell |
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| War does not determine who is right - only who is left. |
| - Bertrand Russell |
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| War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. |
| - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
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| Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. |
| - Jean-Paul Sartre |
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| Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. |
| - Percy bysshe Shelley |
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| War! that mad game the world so loves to play. |
| - Jonathan Swift |
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| Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped. |
| - Harriet Tubman |
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| Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. |
| - Mark Twain |
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| It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. |
| - Voltaire |
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| What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat. |
| - Simone Weil |
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| If we don't end war, war will end us. |
| - H.G. Wells |
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| The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars. |
| - William Westmoreland |
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| War is fear cloaked in courage. |
| - William Westmoreland |
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| In an incredible perversion of justice, former soldiers who sprayed festeringly poisonous chemicals on Vietnam, and now find today that they themselves have been damaged by them, appeal to the people for sympathy and charity. The effects of the defoliant "Agent Orange" are discussed at length, but not one single newspaper article or hearing that we are aware of has even mentioned the effects of the people who still live in those regions of Vietnam. It's as outlandish as if Nazis who gassed Jews were now to come forward and whine that the poisons they utilized had finally made them sick. The staggering monstrousness goes unlaughed at and even unnoticed, as in a Kafka novel. |
| - Fred Woodworth |
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| It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash. |
| - Fred Woodworth |
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