Henri-Frédéric Amiel on war

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881)
From the Journal
Translated by Mrs. Humphry Ward

By far the greater number of human beings can only conceive action, or practise it, under the form of war – a war of competition at home, a bloody war of nations abroad, and finally war with self. So that life is a perpetual combat….

War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or the enslavement of the conquered….Conflict is the result of the selfishness which will acknowledge no other limit than that of external force.