We know that war depresses public dialogue and debate, enlarges executive power, diminishes citizens’ rights, encourages governmental secrecy and deception, and deforms the outlines of human decency. Thus a government making war for the sake of peace, freedom, and human dignity — as it will never cease to declare — will curtail the rights of prisoners, resort to torture, deny its errors, exaggerate its virtues, demonize the enemy, and (as is inevitable in modern war) kill many innocent people, including, of course, many children.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (2005-05-14), Commencement, Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky
(Source)
This was either excerpted from, or included in, his undated essay "Letter to Daniel Kemmis," collected in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, Part 2 (2005).
Quotations about:
just war
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Much has been said in this country about not wanting to participate in foreign wars and people who have said it, must now face the fact that foreign wars come very close to our own shores. We will always have not only the religious groups, but many groups who feel that war is wrong. I cannot imagine how anyone could feel otherwise with the picture before them today. But when force not only rules in certain countries, but is as menacing to all the world, as it is today, one cannot live in a Utopia which prays for different conditions and ignores those which exist.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
Column (1940-05-17), “My Day”
(Source)
[T]here are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) American theologian and clergyman
“Christian Faith and the World Crisis,” Christianity and Crisis (10 Feb 1941)
You judge a war according to who is in the right as long as you have no interest in the outcome; if you’re one of the participants, or if the result is going to have a major effect on you, then you have to create the moral principles that put you in the right — that’s nothing new, everyone knows it.
Steven Brust (b. 1955) American writer, systems programmer
Dragon (1998)
