Online Environmental Forum - Click Here
- Back to Main Page
The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the theme of violence and war. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“Does the commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' mean nothing to us? Are we to interpret it as meaning 'Thou shalt not kill except on the grand scale,' or 'Thou shalt not kill except when the national leaders say to do so'?”
- Linus Pauling
“To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.”
- Albert Einstein
“I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”
- Albert Einstein
“We need a new law that owners of SUVs are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.”
- Jello Biafra
“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
“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
“The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics.”
- Esmat Abdel Mequid
“The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service.”
- Albert Einstein
“It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.”
- Katherine Paterson
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
- Plato
“Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.”
- Carl Sandburg
“The role of the U.S. in the new world corporate order is going to be to export security. That means endless wars and weapons in space. The Pentagon will send our kids off to foreign lands to suppress opposition to corporate globalization. How will we ever end America’s addiction to war and violence as long as our communities are dependent on military spending for jobs? We must work to convert the military industrial complex to sustainable technologies like windpower, solar, and mass transit.”
- Bruce Gagnon
“Violence does even justice unjustly.”
- Thomas Carlyle
“What is war except crime on a mass scale?--destroy rather than produce. The vandal that destroys a window causes not only the owner to bear the costs of replacing it, but costs those whom he planned on using that money to buy from. The same goes for wars. The warlords--of war and peace--destroyed so much, not only what existed, but all those new things that could have existed, if only individuals were left in peace.”
- Adam Young
“Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?”
- Holly Near
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
“The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed.”
- Emma Goldman
“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”
- Barbara Tuchman
“We develop weapons, not to wage war, but to prevent war. Only in the clear light of this greater truth can we properly examine the lesser matter of the testing of our nuclear weapons.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
“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
“Either war is obsolete or men are.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
“In our age there can be no peace that is not honorable; there can be no war that is not dishonorable.”
- Charles Sumner
“We prefer world law, in the age of self-determination, to world war in the age of mass extermination.”
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
“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
“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
- Jeanette Rankin
“Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”
- John F. Kennedy
“If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.”
- Gene Roddenberry
“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