For peace, against war: literary selections

Maria Abdy: May the gentle Dove of Peace extend her snowy pinions o’er us

Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: It is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms

George Ade: The dubious rights granted a people “liberated” through war

Aelian: A parable of two cities

Aelian: That is the benefit of peace

Aeschines: Following a policy of war after war; war, the destroyer of popular government

Aeschines: Peace does not feed laziness

Aeschylus: Ares, father of tears, mows the field of man

Aeschylus: The unpeopled land laments her youth

Aesop: The lies of lupine liberators

Conrad Aiken: The history of war is the history of mankind, seven thousand million dead on the field of battle

Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death

Lucy Aikin: Gentle Peace with healing hand returns

Lucy Aikin: Freedom and Peace with radiant smile now carol o’er the dungeon vile

Lucy Aikin: Sickening I turn on yonder plain to mourn the widows and the slain

Mark Akenside: The hidden plan whence every treaty, every war began

Mark Akenside: Statesmanship versus war

Alain: Why is there war?

Alciphron: Content with a life of peace. Evading conscription is best.

Mark Aldanov: War was the only subject she avoided

Emily Gilmore Alden: The world should write more victories, the victories of love

Richard Aldington: Selections on war

Richard Aldington: All the decay and dead of battlefields entered his blood and seemed to poison him

Richard Aldington: The Blood of the Young Men

Richard Aldington: The criminal cant and rant of war

Richard Aldington: How can we atone for the lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of blood?

Richard Aldington: How well the premeditated mass murder of war is organized

Richard Aldington: It is so important to know how to kill

Richard Aldington: It was a war of missiles, murderous and soul-shaking explosives, like living in the graveyard of the world

Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell

Richard Aldington: Why so sentimental? Why all this fuss over a few million men killed and maimed?

Sholom Aleichem: War, I tell you, is a worldwide massacre

Julius Myron Alexander: The Flag of Peace

Julius Myron Alexander: It is but war, ask not the cause

William Alexander: Cover’d with a bloody stain fields that once look’d pleasantly

William Alexander: No sooner does peace descend than golden age of literature and poetry arises

William Alexander: Of all calamities to which we may be destined, none is so baleful and destructive as war

Vittorio Alfieri: The infamous trade of soldier, the sole basis of all arbitrary authority

Vittorio Alfieri: Thousands immolated on the altar of despotism, slaves born but to fertilize the soil

Peter John Allan: Timid muse from angry Mars would flee, to dwell at peace with nature and mankind

Peter John Allan: ‘Tis Satan’s, and ’twas Xerxes’ lot

Grant Allen: How can he be good if he hires himself out indiscriminately to kill or maim whoever he’s told to?

Grant Allen: I cannot contribute to making peaceable Canadian citizens throw themselves into the devouring whirlpool of militarism

Grant Allen: War and blood money

Hervey Allen: Dragon’s Breath

Hervey Allen: Hands off our dead! To war orators.

James Allen: A Prayer for Peace

James Lane Allen: Then white and heavenly Peace again. Eteocles and Polyneices In America

Ellen P. Allerton: Peace After War

Eric Ambler: It is not good for those who fight to know too much. Speeches, yes. The truth, no!

Eric Ambler: The Law did not think killing for money was insane

American writers on peace and against war

Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games

Amiel on war

Ammianus Marcellinus: Empowering the military…with foreseeable results

Ammianus Marcellinus: War’s landscape: discolored with the hue of dark blood

Anacreon: Rather art and love than lamentable war

Hans Christian Andersen: Art, not arms, rules the world. War, an allegory

Sherwood Anderson: War destroys brotherhood

W. H. Anderson: Our Brother’s Keeper

Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh

Antiphanes: War and personal destiny

Apollodorus: Why do you devote all your thought to injuring one another by making war?

Appian: Drawing the sword for mutual slaughter. The tears of fratricide.

Appian: War fueled by blood and gold, excuse for expenditure of one, expropriation of the other

Louis Aragon: Selections on war

Louis Aragon: Caravans of Peace

Louis Aragon: Children scattering flowers will some day scatter deadly flowers, grenades

Louis Aragon: The military: parasite and defender of parasitism

Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession

Louis Aragon: War and its gloomy procession of storm clouds, sacred rites, illusions and lies

Louis Aragon: War, signal for the coming massacre of the sacrificial herd

Aratus: Justice deserts earth with warning of wars and cruel bloodshed

Pietro Aretino: Overjoyed at statue of Peace and her flames burning up arms of war

Pietro Aretino: Proper task, the giving of a beginning to peace and an end to wars

Arturo Arias: There were bodies everywhere. They didn’t move. They were called corpses.

Ludovico Ariosto: Cast new weapons into the hell from which they came

Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse

Aristophanes: Rescuing Peace

Aristotle: How tyrants use war

Aristotle: Leader not praiseworthy in training citizens for conquest and dominion

Aristotle: A man would be regarded as a bloodthirsty monster if he were to make war just to produce battles and slaughter

Aristotle: When they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing

Edwin Arnold: Heaven’s love descending in that loveliest word, PEACE!

Edwin Arnold: My chariot shall not roll with bloody wheels till earth wears the red record of my name

Matthew Arnold: Man shall live in peace, as now in war

Matthew Arnold: New Age. Uphung the spear, unbent the bow.

Matthew Arnold: Tolstoy’s commandments of peace

Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors

Mikhail Artsybashev: The death of a single soldier

Mikhail Artsybashev: Don’t talk to me about the beauty of war. No, no, your war is ugly.

Mikhail Artsybashev: A mother’s simple prescription against war

Victor Astafiev: On sunny days in peacetime all places are different, in wartime all are alike

W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain

W. H. Auden: O What Is That Sound

W. H. Auden: The shield of Achilles

Berthold Auerbach: Practicing for mutual manslaughter

Augustine: To make war on your neighbors, what else is this to be called than great robbery?

Aulus Gellius: Thievery as school for war

Alfred Austin: The White Pall of Peace

Marcel Aymé: A child’s view of war

Marcel Aymé: Novel way to end a war

Bacchylides: Paean on peace

Francis Bacon: Arts benefit man more than arms

Joanna Baillie: And shall we think of war? 

Joanna Baillie: Do children return from rude jarring war?

Joanna Baillie: Making his simple audience to shrink with tales of war and blood

Joanna Baillie: Thy native land, freed from the ills of war, a land of peace!

H. Lavinia Baily: By the Sea. An Argument for Peace.

H. Lavinia Baily: A Lost Song?

H. Lavinia Baily: A New Earth

H. Lavinia Baily: Recall

Josephine Turck Baker: To the Mothers of the Martyred Dead upon the Field of Battle

Balzac: Mass executions: Has Europe ever ceased from wars?

Isabella Banks: Absolve our souls from blood shed in our country’s cause

Isabella Banks: The bugle of war, the bugle of peace

Isabella Banks: “Glory, glory, glory!” As if murder were not sin!

Isabella Banks: Lay down weapons, war should cease

Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Peace and Shepherd

Anna Laetitia Barbauld: The storm of horrid war rolls dreadful on

Anna Laetitia Barbauld: War’s least horror is th’ ensanguined field

Mary Barber: The officer’s widow

Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly: The jackals of war

Henri Barbusse: Selections on war

Henri Barbusse: All battles spring from themselves and necessitate each other to infinity

Henri Barbussse: As long as the colors of uniforms cover the flesh of men

Henri Barbusse: The awful power of a dead man

Henri Barbusse: Blood-stained priest of the God of War

Henri Barbusse: Butchery as far as the eye can see

Henri Barbusse: Cold death sits brooding, great and sumptuous bird of prey is in the act of taking wing

Henri Barbusse: Crows eddying round naked flesh with flapping banners and war-cries

Henri Barbusse: The enemy is militarism and no other

Henri Barbusse: Flags and swords, instruments of the cult of human sacrifice

Henri Barbusse: The goddess of slaughter, the world worn out by war

Henri Barbusse: I will wage war, even though I alone may survive

Henri Barbusse: Jesus on the battlefield

Henri Barbusse: Manual laborers of war glutting the cannon’s mouth with their flesh

Henri Barbusse: The mournful hearse of the army razes harshly

Henri Barbusse: Murder enters as invisibly as death itself. Industry multiplies its magic.

Henri Barbusse: The only cause of war is the slavery of those whose flesh wages it

Henri Barbusse: Pay for a glory which is not yours or for ruins that others have made with your hands

Henri Barbusse: “Perhaps it is the last war of all”

Henri Barbusse: Sepulchral sculptor’s great sketch-model, the gate of hell

Henri Barbusse: Soldier’s glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war

Henri Barbusse: “That’s war. It’s not anything else.”

Henri Barbusse: There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war

Henri Barbusse: These murdered souls, covered with black veils; they are you and I

Henri Barbusse: Torture…agony…human sacrifices…

Henri Barbusse: Under Fire

Henri Barbusse: War, as hideous morally as physically

Henri Barbusse: War befouls the country as it does faces and hearts

Henri Barbusse: “War must be killed; war itself”

Henri Barbusse: War which breeds war, whether by victory or defeat

Henri Barbusse: War’s loathsome horror and lunacy

Henri Barbusse: “We must have a new Ministry: a new public opinion: War.”

Henri Barbusse: The world has come to the end of its strength: it is vanquished by wars

Henri Barbusse: “You understand, I’m against all wars”

Maurice Baring: August, 1918

Maurice Baring: The greater fools are you who seek the wars

Maurice Baring: Unalterable horror, misery, pain and suffering which is caused by modern war

Maurice Baring: The Wounded

Joel Barlow: War after war his hungry soul require, each land lie reeking with its people’s slain

Charlotte Alington Barnard: Peace Hovers

Giambattista Basile: “To war, to war”: Tavern warriors

Katharine Lee Bates: Selections on war and peace

Katharine Lee Bates: Carnage! Bayonet, bomb and shell! Merry reading for hell!

Katharine Lee Bates: Children of the War

Katharine Lee Bates: The doomful, mad torpedo, the colossal slaughter-guns

Katharine Lee Bates: Fodder for Cannon

Katharine Lee Bates: Marching Feet

Katharine Lee Bates: Mother

Katharine Lee Bates: When the Millennium Comes

Pierre Bayle: The God of fratricide is a lunatic invention

Pierre Bayle: Men of blood not permitted to build temples

James Beattie: Ode to Peace

Francis Bebey: They all come into the world speaking the same language of peace and friendship

Thomas Lovell Beddoes: War’s harvest

Aphra Behn: No rough sound of war’s alarms

Aphra Behn: The pen triumphs over the sword

Edward Bellamy: We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers

Hilaire Belloc: After the tempest and destruction of universal war, permanence

Hilaire Belloc: War, propaganda and lies

Julien Benda: Military mysticism

Stephen Vincent Benét: The dead march from the last to the next blind war

Stephen Vincent Benét: Nightmare For Future Reference: The second year of the Third World War

Stephen Vincent Benét: Toy soldiers

W. C. Benet: Hymn of Peace

William Rose Benét: The Red Country

Ida Whipple Benham: The Friend of Peace

Ida Whipple Benham: War’s weeding

Ida Whipple Benham: The White Prince of peace

Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure

Adelaide George Bennett: The Peace-Pipe Quarry

Arnold Bennett: The miraculous lunacy of war

Arnold Bennett: The Primary Object of War

Arnold Bennett: The Slaughterer

Arnold Bennett: War casualties and war profiteers

Arthur Christopher Benson: No carnal triumph of the empurpled sword

Robert Hugh Benson: The whole human race will be at war

Jeremy Bentham: A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace

Jeremy Bentham: War is mischief upon the largest scale

Elizabeth Bentley: On the return of celestial peace

Elizabeth Bentley: Terror-striking War shalt be banish’d far

Pierre-Jean de Béranger: The Holy Alliance of Peace

Pierre-Jean de Béranger: When from the miseries of war we wake…

George Berkeley: Continuing dishonorable war is committing murder, rapine, sacrilege and violence

Georges Bernanos: War, the penalty of rendering unto Caesar what is no longer his

Georges Bernanos: Wars like epidemics, with neither beginning nor end

Samuel Bernard: A pipe dream of peace

Giuseppe Berto: Selections on war

Giuseppe Berto: Bombing produced cities of the dead

Giuseppe Berto: A fable: The war was going well, the war was going badly

Giuseppe Berto: It was a good night for an air raid. Somewhere or other there would be terror and death and destruction.

Giuseppe Berto: No one truly survives war

Giuseppe Berto: One of the fruits of war, that people should feel so alone and desolate

Giuseppe Berto: Orphaned by the bombs

Giuseppe Berto: The sound of the bombs whistling, the sounds of human suffering, the groans, the screams, the agonized appeals

Giuseppe Berto: Stop destroying so many good things that existed on earth simply in order to slaughter each other

Giuseppe Berto: Then the war passed over our countryside

Giuseppe Berto: A universal evil has given them the power to kill unknown people, people very like themselves

Giuseppe Berto: War destroys the soul even when it spares the body

Walter Besant: War and the destruction of London, a city lone and widowed

Walter Besant: Wisdom and war

Matilda Betham: All the horrid charms of war

Horace P. Biddle: Wine, War, and Love

Ambrose Bierce: Selections on war

Ambrose Bierce: Chickamauga

Ambrose Bierce: The Coup de Grâce

Ambrose Bierce: Demonic war

Ambrose Bierce: He created patriotism and taught the nations war

Ambrose Bierce: Killed At Resaca

Ambrose Bierce: Military Malthusianism

Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Ambrose Bierce: War as parricide

Ambrose Bierce: Warlike America

Augustine Birrell: Richard Cobden, visionary of world peace

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: All labor’s dread of war’s mad waste and murder

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: I saw a dove fear-daunted

William Black: Better small farms, thriving and prosperous, than splendid ruins that tell of the fierceness of war

William Black: Military glory, the most mean, the most cruel and contemptible thing under the sun!

William Black: When Caesar’s legions turn on him

Robert Blair: Where are the mighty thunderbolts of war?

William Blake: Selections on war and peace

William Blake: Be withdrawn cloudy war, troops of warriors depart, nor around our peaceable city breathe

William Blake: Groaning among the happier dead

William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!

William Blake: O go not forth in Martyrdoms & Wars

William Blake: To peaceful arts shall envy bow

Susanna Blamire: When the eye sees the grief that from one battle flows, small cause of triumph can the bravest feel

Charles A. Blanchard: What is war? Is peace possible?

Jean Blewett: Above the din of martial clamor, a crying in the dark

Jean Blewett: The doves are nesting in the cannons grim

Mathilde Blind: All vile things that batten on disaster follow feasting in the wake of war

Mathilde Blind: Reaping War’s harvest grim and gory

Mathilde Blind: Widowing the world of men to win the world

Alexander Blok: The kite, the mother and endless war

León Bloy: The Sword

Edmund Blunden: Writings on war

Edmund Blunden: The black fiend leaps brick-red as life’s last picture goes

Edmund Blunden: The bondservice of destruction

Edmund Blunden: Death could not kneel

Edmund Blunden: Harsher screamed the condor war

Edmund Blunden: How silver clear against war’s hue and cry each syllable of peace the gods allowed

Edmund Blunden: Initiation into war

Edmund Blunden: One needed no occult gift to notice the shadow of death

Edmund Blunden: War tableaux

Edmund Blunden: War’s harvest

Edmund Blunden: War’s undormant cemetery

Edmund Blunden: We stood estranged with the ghosts of war between

Edmund Blunden: A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: “How I am wounded for thee in these wars”

Robert Bly: War, writers and government money

Giovanni Boccaccio: Avarice armed mankind in violence

Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt: Christianity and War

Boethius: Provoking death’s destined day by waging unjust and cruel wars

Evgeny Bogat: Hiroshima and Socrates

Evgeny Bogat: In a world of napalm and burning villages, love is the triumph over non-existence

Evgeny Bogat: Rembrandt’s girl

Heinrich Böll: Every death in war is a murder – a murder for which someone is responsible

Heinrich Böll: I saw the fateful gleam in his eyes too late

Heinrich Böll: I’m going to die soon and before the war is over. I shall never know peace again.

Wolfgang Borchert: It was war; stories from a primer

Wolfgang Borchert: Only one thing to do, say No!

George Borrow: Prisoners of war: misery on one side, disgrace on the other

Henri Bosco: Man kills just for the sake of killing

Carl John Bostelmann: Hate, still thy drums! War, make thy trumpets mute!

James Boswell: On War

James Boswell: Samuel Johnson – war is worst type of all violence

James Boswell: Who profits by war?

Pierre Boulle: The long reach of war profiteers

Randolph Bourne: Selections on war

Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals

Randolph Bourne: War and the State

Randolph Bourne: Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it

Randolph Bourne: Conscience and Intelligence in War

Randolph Bourne: Twilight of Idols

Randolph Bourne: Below the Battle

Jane Bowdler: War’s deadly futility

William Lisle Bowles: Selections on war and peace

William Lisle Bowles: As War’s black trump pealed its terrific blast

William Lisle Bowles: The dread name of the hideous war-fiend shall perish

William Lisle Bowles: The Fiend of War, sated with slaughter

William Lisle Bowles: Grim-visaged War drowns with his trumpet’s blast a brother’s cries

William Lisle Bowles: Oh, when will the long tempestuous night of warfare and of woe be rolled away!

William Lisle Bowles: When her war-song Victory doth sing, Destruction flaps aloft her iron-hurtling wing

Henry Noel Brailsford: Waiting for the horrors of a war that was coming

Henry Noel Brailsford: Who is the happy warrior?

Berton Braley: The nobler army fights the bloodless battles of industry and peace

Georg Brandes: Selections on war

Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder

Georg Brandes: War, uninterrupted series of horrors, atrocities, and slaughter

Georg Brandes: The World at War

Georg Brandes: The Praise of War

Georg Brandes: Only officers and ammunition-makers wish war

Georg Brandes: Two million men held in readiness to exterminate each other

Georg Brandes: Wars waged by governments fronting for financial oligarchies

Georg Brandes: Abrupt about-face, the glorification of war

Georg Brandes: Giants of bloodshed; military staffs foster war

Georg Brandes: The future will look on war as the present looks on witchcraft, the Inquisition

Georg Brandes: War not fight for ideals but fight for concessions

F. V. Branford: Over the Dead

Bertolt Brecht: Selections on war

Bertolt Brecht: For its material and moral beneficiaries, war can look forward to a prosperous future

Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere

Bertolt Brecht: I won’t let you spoil my war for me

Bertolt Brecht: In war the attacker always has an alibi

Bertolt Brecht: Maimed soldiers are anti-war demonstrators

Bertolt Brecht: One’s only got to make a war to become a millionaire. It’s amazing!

Bertolt Brecht: Picture-book generals more dangerous, less brave, than serial killers

Bertolt Brecht: To hear the big fellows talk, they wage war from fear of God and for all things bright and beautiful

Bertolt Brecht: The upper classes sacrifice for the soldiers

Bertolt Brecht: War Song

Bertolt Brecht: Wherein a holy war differs from other wars

Edward Arnold Brenholtz: Selections on peace and war

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: The Demon, War

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: The Dying Warrior

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: If war is sane, make me insane

Edward Arnold Brenholtz: Now be the God of Peace adored

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: The Passion of Peace

Edwin Arnold Brenholtz: Peace, the Conqueror

Robert Bridges: And this is War!

Vera Mary Brittain: August, 1914

British writers on peace and war

Louis Bromfield: NATO, Permanent War Panic and America’s Messiah Complex

Van Wyck Brooks: The truth about war that Mark Twain could only divulge after death

William E. Brooks: Memorial Day

Laura Helena Brower: Heritage. The blighted fruit of war.

Charles Brockden Brown: Such is the spectacle exhibited in every field of battle

Frances Brown: An avenger mightier than war

Waldo R. Browne: War, a parable

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: War’s human harvest

Robert Browning: Selections on peace and war

Robert Browning: The devil’s doctrine, the paraded shame of war

Robert Browning: Far and wide the victims of our warfare strew the plain

Robert Browning: Peace, in whom depths of wealth lie

Robert Browning: Peace rises within them ever more and more

Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North

Kenneth Bruce: Universal Peace

William Jennings Bryan: What the world would have lost if Shakespeare had been killed as a soldier, Burns had fallen on the battlefield

William Cullen Bryant: Christmas 1875

William Cullen Bryant: Emblem of the peace that yet shall be, noise of war shall cease from sea to sea

John Buchan: That night I realized the crazy folly of war

Robert Buchanan: The moon gleamed on the dreadful drifts of dead

John Wright Buckham: The Heroisms of Peace

Edward Bulwer Lytton: Selections on peace and war

Edward Bulwer Lytton: Ghouls on the field of slaughter

Edward Bulwer Lytton: The heartless and miserable vanity from which arose wars neither useful nor honourable

Edward Bulwer Lytton: The sword, consecrating homicide and massacre with a hollow name

Edward Bulwer Lytton: War and wrath and rapine cease, O Messenger of Peace!

Edward Bulwer Lytton: “We poor men have no passion for war”

George Shepard Burleigh: Martial Heroism

George Shepard Burleigh: When shall the crystal fount of Peace wash out the hideous stain of blood?

Dana Burnett: Selections on war

Dana Burnet: Ammunition. The Dead.

Dana Burnet: Christmas in the Trenches

Dana Burnet: The Deserter

Dana Burnet: The Dreadnaught

Dana Burnet: The Glory of War

Dana Burnet: Napoleon’s Tomb

Dana Burnet: Sleep, Little Soldier, Sleep

Dana Burnet: The Village

Dana Burnet: War

Dana Burnet: The world’s awry and there are no more dreams!

Robert Burns: I hate murder by flood or field

Robert Burns: Peace, thy olive wand extend and bid wild War his ravage end

Robert Burns: Wars, the plagues of human life

Vincent Godfrey Burns: An Ex-Serviceman Makes a Vow

Vincent Godfrey Burns: Hell à la mode

Vincent Godfrey Burns: The Hun

Amelia Josephine Burr: Two Viewpoints

Elihu Burritt: Dismantled Arsenals. Death, sin and Satan weep over the grave of their renowned confederate, War.

Elihu Burritt: Woman and War

Struthers Burt: To a Friend Wanting War

Robert Burton: Hypocrites who make the trumpet of the gospel the trumpet of war

Robert Burton: War’s nuptials, war’s justice

Robert Burton: We hate the hawk because it is always at war

Robert Burton: What fury first brought so devilish, so brutish a thing as war into men’s minds?

Samuel Butler: Religion of war

Samuel Butler: Valor in modern warfare

Witter Bynner: War

Byron: Selections on war

Byron: The age of beauty will succeed the sport of war

Byron: All ills past, present and to come yield to the true portrait of one battle-field

Byron: Blasted below the hot breath of war

Byron: The drying up a single tear has more of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.

Byron: Gore and glory seen in hell alone

Byron: The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away

Byron: I loathe all war and warriors

Byron: I made no wars

Byron: Just ponder what a pious pastime war is

Byron: Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet

Byron: The time is past when swords subdued

Byron: War, banquet for wolf and worm

Byron: War cuts up not only branch, but root

Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought – and that was death

Byron: War feeds the vultures, wolves and worms

Byron: War returns on its perpetrator

Byron: War’s a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art

Callimachus: Nurse peace, that he who sows may also reap

Calpurnius Siculus: The unholy War-Goddess shall yield. All wars shall be quelled in Tartarean durance.

George Frederick Cameron: Is it true greatness to lead armed hirelings on to bleed?

Thomas Campbell: Selections on peace and war

Thomas Campbell: Maddening strife and blood-stain’d fields to come

Thomas Campbell: Men will weep for him when many a guilty martial fame is dim

Thomas Campbell: Sending whirlwind warrants forth to rouse the slumbering fiends of war

Thomas Campbell: Shall War’s polluted banner ne’er be furl’d?

Thomas Campbell: The snow shall be their winding-sheet, every turf a soldier’s sepulchre

Thomas Campbell: That first spoke peace to man

Thomas Campion: Raving war wastes our empty fields

Thomas Campion: Then bloody swords and armour should not be

Thomas Campion: Upright man needs neither towers nor armour

Albert Camus: Where war lives. The reign of beasts has begun.

Karel Čapek: The War with the Newts

Ernesto Cardenal: They speak of peace and secretly prepare for war

Thomas Carew: Lust for gold fills the world with tumult, blood, and war

Thomas Carew: They’ll hang their arms upon the olive bough

Thomas Carlyle: Selections on war

Thomas Carlyle: Fighting with steel murder-tools

Thomas Carlyle: Inept government’s sole achievement, getting together men to kill other men

Thomas Carlyle: War is a quarrel between two thieves

Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!

Thomas Carlyle: The works of peace versus battles and war-tumults

Alejo Carpentier: War’s long reach

William Herbert Carruth: When the Cannon Booms

Alice Cary: Better dwell the lowliest shepherd of Arcadia’s bowers

Baldassare Castiglione: Leaders must prepare their people for peace, not war

Baldassare Castiglione: Sabine peace

Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man

Benvenuto Cellini: War kept behind closed doors

Cervantes: Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony

Alexander Chakovsky: The war, the darkness and the cold. “And then everything will come back?”

Mary Chandler: The noise of war is hushed

William Ellery Channing: Sermon on War

George Chapman: Men’s want of peace, which was from want of love

George Chapman: Peace with all her heavenly seed

François-René de Chateaubriand: What is war? A barbaric profession.

Chateaubriand: Would-be master of the world who knew only how to destroy

Thomas Chatterton: Peace, gentlest, softest of the virtues

Geoffrey Chaucer: The city to the soldier’s rage resigned; successless wars and poverty behind

Anton Chekhov: You can’t remember a single year without war

Anne Cleveland Cheney: All Ye Who Pass By

Victor Cherbuliez and Erich Fromm: Wars are outbursts of destructiveness and paranoid suspicion

Charles Chesnutt: Justice, Peace – the seed and the flower of civilisation

G.K. Chesterton: In modern war defeat is complete defeat

G. K. Chesterton: War’s regressive tendency

José Santos Chocano: When a future explorer uncovers that rarest of things, a sword

John Chrysostom: God is not a God of war and fighting

Charles Churchill: Thousands bleed for some vile spot where fifty cannot feed

Cicero: All wars, undertaken without a proper motive, are unjust

Cicero: Even war’s victories should be forgotten

Cicero: Military commands, phantom of glory and the ruin of one’s own country and personal downfall

Jules Claretie: A sensible man can but have one opinion on the question of war and peace

Thomas Curtis Clark: Apparitions

Thomas Curtis Clark: Bugle Song of Peace

Thomas Curtis Clark: Who made war?

Claudian: Hell’s numberless monsters plot war

Jean-Paul Clébert: Concrete monsters. Had war devastated everything and there was no one left alive?

Clement of Alexandria: Gods of war

Clement of Alexandria: Let us gird ourselves with the armour of peace

Caroline Clive: The bloody words of ruffian war

Arthur Hugh Clough: For an impalpable odour of honour armies shall bleed

Arthur Hugh Clough: Ye vulgar dreamers about peace

Florence Earle Coates: The New Mars

Florence Earle Coates: War

Humphrey Cobb: Selections on war

Humphrey Cobb: Generals are reassured by the smell of the dead

Humphrey Cobb: Hallucination of fantastic butchery; too much for one man to bear

Humphrey Cobb: The paths of glory lead but to the rats

Humphrey Cobb: Reworking the sixth commandment for war; thou shalt not commit individual murder

Humphrey Cobb: War never settled anything except who was the strongest

Elizabeth Cobbold: Earth’s bosom drenching with her children’s blood

Margaret Postgate Cole: They fell, like snowflakes wiping out the noon

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: Lilies and Doves

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selections on peace and war

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: And war still violates the unfinished works of peace

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The demon War and its attendants, maniac Suicide and giant Murder

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Fire, Famine, And Slaughter: A War Eclogue

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: From all sides rush the thirsty brood of War!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War and all its dread vicissitudes pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War is a murderous fiend, by fiends adored

John Collins: Till war becomes a crime abhorred, and earth be blessed with endless peace

William Collins: Ode to Peace

Auguste Comte: Permanent warfare as foundation of retrograde system, incompatible with modern civilization

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac: Peace will not make good all the evils war has caused

Nicolas de Condorcet: War can never benefit the majority of individuals of a nation

Nicolas de Condorcet: War, the most dreadful of all calamities, the most terrible of all crimes

William Congreve: Cursed ambition wakes the world to war and ruin

William Congreve: No more do youth leave the sacred arts for stubborn arms

Elizabeth Connor: This World War

Joseph Conrad: Selections on war

Joseph Conrad: Democratic, commercial wars more ferocious than those of kings

Joseph Conrad: Firing into a continent, a touch of insanity in the proceeding

Joseph Conrad: From the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans calls for vengeance from Heaven

Joseph Conrad: Humanity’s inhuman toleration of war

Joseph Conrad: In modern war mankind cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance

Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war

Joseph Conrad: Moral cannibals feeding on each other’s misfortunes: ‘It’s a damned bad war, but it’s better than no war at all.’

Joseph Conrad: Never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men

Joseph Conrad: War makes earth a pagan planet

Joseph Conrad: With earth soaked in blood, all men seek some formula of peace

Eliza Cook: Selections on peace and war

Eliza Cook: Crimson battlefield. When the world shall be spread with tombless dead.

Eliza Cook: I felt a shuddering horror lurk, to think I’d mingled in such work

Eliza Cook: No bloodstain lingers there. The plough and the spear.

Eliza Cook: Not where bullet, sword, and shield lie strown with the gory slain

Eliza Cook: Who can love the laurel wreath, plucked from the gory field of death?

James Fenimore Cooper: Selections on peace and war

James Fenimore Cooper: Is there a star where war and bloodshed aren’t known?

James Fenimore Cooper: Oppression and injustice the natural consequences of military power uncurbed by restraints of civil authority

James Fenimore Cooper: The short-lived patriotism of war

James Fenimore Cooper: The uncelebrated victims of war

James Fenimore Cooper: War’s victory not worth the sacrifice of human life

François Coppée: God preserve us from scientific war, the worst of any

Michel Corday: Selections from The Paris Front

Michel Corday: Blood! Blood! But there is still not enough.

Michel Corday: The everlasting glorification of murder

Michel Corday: War, the most brutal heritage of the past

Michel Corday: In war fathers bury their sons

Michel Corday: War sentiment is general dementia, barbarous and neolithic

Michel Corday: Millions of men killed to cure a single hypochondriac

Michel Corday: War – hell let loose, butchery, a return to barbarism

Michel Corday: War is irreparable loss for the earth and the human race

Michel Corday: The hideous futility of war in itself

Michel Corday: Future description of these horrors ought to make any return of war impossible

Michel Corday: Striking against war

Michel Corday: The Truth is the chief victim of war

Michel Corday: Glorification of slaughter is the beginning of future armaments

Michel Corday: The plague that comes in war’s train\

Joseph Cottle: Selections on war

Joseph Cottle: If on the slaughter’d field some mind humane…

Joseph Cottle: Know you their crimes on whom you warfare wage?

Joseph Cottle: Plant the seeds of universal peace

Joseph Cottle: Torn from their cots to wield the murderer’s blade

Joseph Cottle: Warn mankind to shun the hostile spear

Joseph Cottle: War’s noxious breath fills earth with discord, dread, and death

Peter L. Courtier: Ode to Peace

Victor Cousin: When might is right, natural state of man is war

Francis Coutts: Why was no better gift by thee bequeathed than a sword unsheathed?

Abraham Cowley: Like the peace, but think it comes too late

Abraham Cowley: Only peace breeds scarcity in Hell

Abraham Cowley: To give peace and then the rules of peace

Malcolm Cowley: By day there are only the dead

William Cowper: Selections on peace and war

William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man: Homo homini lupus

William Cowper: In every heart are sown the sparks that kindle fiery war

William Cowper: Never shall you hear the voice of war again

William Cowper: O place me in some heaven-protected isle where no crested warrior dips his plume in blood

William Cowper: Peace, both the duty and the prize

William Cowper: They trust in navies and armies

William Cowper: Universal soldiership has stabbed the heart of man

Wilbur F. Crafts: Not mailed but nailed the hands he turned to the world

Stephen Crane: An Episode of War

Stephen Crane: There was crimson clash of war

Stephen Crane: War Is Kind

Richard Crashaw: In Hell’s palaces

F. Marion Crawford: Find a priest for those I have killed

F. Marion Crawford: The real issue is between civilization and barbarism, between peace and war

F. Marion Crawford: When everyone understands war it will stop by universal consent

F. Marion Crawford: The world dreads the very name of war, lest it should become universal once it breaks out

Isabella Valancy Crawford: The Forging of the Sword

Isabella Valancy Crawford: Peace

Isabella Valancy Crawford: War

Ann Batten Cristall: Pity, Liberty, and Peace

Ann Batten Cristall: Relief for nature, man at war with themselves

Maria Briscoe Croker: War and Peace

Ernest Crosby: Selections against war, for peace

Ernest Crosby: The Bugler in the Rear

Ernest Crosby: Peace

Ernest Crosby: The Peace Congress

Ernest Crosby: Peace has outgrown all that, for Peace is a man

Ernest Crosby: They know not love that love not peace

Ernest Crosby: War and Hell

Ernest Crosby: Woman and War

Martha Foote Crow: There is no Christ left in all those carnage-loving lands

William Crowe: On poets who sing of war

E. E. Cummings: Detention camp during wartime

Mary L. Cummins: The News of War

Mary L. Cummins: The Women Who Wait

William Cunningham: A thousand gifts are thine, Sweet Peace! – which War can never know

Quintus Curtius: So completely does war invert even the laws of Nature

Cyprian: War cannot consist with peace

Charlotte Dacre: Peace

Charlotte Dacre: War

Dante: The decree of peace the centuries wept for

Dante: The fate of those who deal in bloodshed and in pillaging

Olive Tilford Dargan: Beyond War

Rubén Darío: You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes

James Darmesteter: War and prophecy

Alphonse Daudet: Revenge and war

William Davenant : War, the sport of kings, increases the number of dead

John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again

John Davidson: The blood of men poured out in endless wars

W.H. Davies: The blind hatred engendered by war

Richard Harding Davis: Destruction versus civilization, soldiers and engineers

Thomas Day: Wages abhorred war with humankind

Cecil Day-Lewis: Newsreel

John William De Forest: Uncivil war

Cecelia De Vere: The American flag. Peacemakers, called the children of Great God.

Daniel Defoe: Mammon and Mars, twin deities

Thomas Dekker: Lands ravaged by soldiers and war

Sven Delblanc: No, three megatons, it’s a question of moral principle

Democritus: Strange humor: Men covet war in time of peace

Demosthenes: When war comes home, the fatal weaknesses of states are revealed

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: War leads to despotism, despotism to war

Charles Dickens: Waging war to perpetuate slavery

Emily Dickinson: I many times thought Peace had come

Denis Diderot: War is contest between beast and savage

Dio Cassius: Weeping and lamenting the fratricide of war

Dio Cassius: When peace was announced the mountains resounded

Dio Chystostom: Greed leads to internal strife and foreign wars

Dio Chrystostom: On the fate of states educated only for war

Diodorus Siculus: Alexander’s first encounter with military glory

Diodorus Siculus: History is more than the recording of wars

Diogenes Laertius: Steel and eloquence

Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Numa’s arbiters of peace

Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Scorn rapine and violence and the profits accruing from war

Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Women’s plea for peace

Sydney Dobell: The Army Surgeon

Alfred Döblin: The law and the police are at the service of the war state and its slavery

Alfred Döblin: The old grim cry for war

Alfred Döblin: War is not ineluctable fate

Alfred Döblin: We march to war, Death folds his cloak singing: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

Austin Dobson: Before Sedan

Nathan Haskell Dole: Selections on peace

Nathan Haskell Dole: Death: War is my Master-stroke since Days of Yore

Nathan Haskell Dole: Here are War’s pomp and circumstance

Nathan Haskell Dole: Peace’s exultation

Nathan Haskell Dole: The Reign of Peace

Nathan Haskell Dole: Thanks offering of the God of Waste and Destruction

Nathan Haskell Dole: The Vision of Peace

James B. Dollard: The Battle-Line

Alfred Dommett: A Christmas hymn. The peaceful Prince of earth and heaven.

John Donne: The horror and ghastliness of war

John Donne: War and misery are one thing

John Dos Passos: Selection on war

John Dos Passos: Meat for guns. Shot for saying the war was wrong.

John Dos Passos: The miserable dullness of industrialized slaughter

John Dos Passos: Not wake up till the war was over and you could be a human being again

John Dos Passos: They were going to kill everybody who spoke that language

John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers

John Dos Passos on Randolph Bourne: War is the health of the state

John Dos Passos: What was the good of stopping the war if the armies continued?

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Selections on war

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The abysmal cunning of war

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Decide for yourself, has civilization made mankind more bloodthirsty?

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The desire to rule mankind as slaves leads West to colossal, final war

1862: Dostoevsky on the new world order

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The expediency and inexpediency of war

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Holocaustal weapons of future wars

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Holy blood was shed, regular wars sprang up

Marion Doyle: Mars and Kings have silenced all their singing

Augusta Theodosia Drane: It needs must be that gentle Peace prevail!

Michael Drayton: All your banks with peace preserved be

Theodore Dreiser: If he went he might be shot, and what would his noble emotion amount to then? He would rather make money, regulate current political, social and financial affairs

Theodore Dreiser: The logic of military victory, an apologue

Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket

John Drinkwater: I sing of peace while nations market in death

John Drinkwater: We Mothers Know

Louise Driscoll: The Metal Checks

Maurice Druon: A contempt for all things military

Maurice Druon: The dual prerogatives of minting coins and waging wars

Maurice Druon: Why I exhort you not to threaten each other with your armaments

John Dryden: All your care is to provide the horrid pomp of war

John Dryden: In peace the thoughts of war he could remove

John Dryden and Horace: Happy is he who trumpets summon not to war

John Dryden and Lucretius: Venus and Mars: Lull the world in universal peace

Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas: Breaking oaths of peace, cover the fields with bloody carcasses

W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace

Maxime Du Camp: Gautier, war filled him with horror

Georges Duhamel: Selections on war

Georges Duhamel: The demon of war had imprisoned us under his knee

Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket

Georges Duhamel: Mosaic of pain stained with mud and blood, the colours of war

Georges Duhamel: No end to war without moral reeducation

Georges Duhamel: No man desires war…but if there’s money to be made…

Georges Duhamel: The possession of the world is not decided by guns. It is the noble work of peace.

Georges Duhamel: The stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men

Georges Duhamel: The Third Symphony, a slender bridge across the abyss

Georges Duhamel: War and civilization

Georges Duhamel: War has achieved the mournful miracle of denaturing nature, rendering it ignoble and criminal

Georges Duhamel: Who has taught children of man that war brings happiness?

Georges Duhamel: World where now there are more graveyards than villages

Alexandre Dumas: The dove

Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts

S. B. Dunn: In Terra Pax

Finley Peter Dunne: A great nation at war (in the vernacular)

Maurice Duplay: Colloquy on science and war

Maurice Duplay: Imperative to uproot the passion of war

Marguerite Duras: The civilizing mission

Jean Dutourd: The horrors of war

Edward Dyer: So that of war the very name may not be heard again

Georg Ebers: Each one must bring a victim to the war

Eça de Queirós: Afghanistan

Eça de Queirós: The English in Egypt, a case study

J.A. Edgerton: A Song of Peace

J.A. Edgerton: When the cannon’s roar shall be heard no more

George Eliot: Tart rebuke of crude war propaganda

Havelock Ellis: War, a relapse from civilisation into barbarism, if not savagery

Paul Éluard: True law of men despite the misery and war

Emma Catherine Embury: Proud soldier turns from scenes of war

Ralph Waldo Emerson: All history is the decline of war. Cannot peace be, as well as war?

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The cause of peace is not the cause of cowardice

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism

Epictetus: I and mine, the cause of wars

Erasmus: Selections on war

Erasmus: Against War

Erasmus: The Complaint of Peace

Erasmus: How an astute general conducts warfare

Erasmus: Of a Soldier’s Life

Erasmus: The Soldier and the Carthusian

Erasmus: War is a betrayal of Christianity

Erasmus: What is it that moves people to be so hot for war? What will they get by it?

Erasmus: What is more foolish than war?

Erckmann-Chatrian: In a century the war gods will be recognized as barbarians

Erckmann-Chatrian: In war belligerents conspire against their own citizens

John Erskine: Dedication

Euripides: The crown of War, the crown of Woe

Nathaniel Evans: Ode on the Prospect of Peace

Maria Louise Eve: Disarm!

Laura Bell Everett: The Skein of Grievous War

William Norman Ewer: Five Souls

Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Today, war means the annihilation of the human race itself

Eleanor Farjeon: Now that you too join the vanishing armies

Eleanor Farjeon: Peace Poem

Marianne Farningham: Give Peace

George Farquhar: What induced you to turn soldier?

Henri Fauconnier: A chance encounter on the evening of a day of slaughter

William Faulkner: All we ever needed to do is just say, Enough of this

William Faulkner: It’s simple nameless war which decimates our ranks

William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?

William Faulkner: To militarists, all civilians, even their own, are alien intruders

Joseph Fawcett: Selections against war

Joseph Fawcett: Broken hearts to broken limbs reply. War expands in space and time.

Joseph Fawcett: Civilized war! The cool carnage of the cultured world.

Joseph Fawcett: The contemptible wagers of civilized war

Joseph Fawcett: The deep scarlet shame of unceasing war

Joseph Fawcett: The distempered dream of war

Joseph Fawcett: Law prosecutes single murder, ignores mass murder

Joseph Fawcett: Uncurs’d the ornamented murderers move

Joseph Fawcett: War and music. Perversion most perverse! Misapplication monstrous!

Joseph Fawcett: War Elegy

Joseph Fawcett: War mocks and degrades nature, God, mind, commerce, agriculture

Konstantin Fedin: Is there anyone who doesn’t want this war to be the last one on earth?

Osyp Yuriy Fedkovych: The Recruit

Fénelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man

Lion Feuchtwanger: Selections on war

Lion Feuchtwanger: The demand for perpetual peace must be raised again and again

Lion Feuchtwanger: The future national state: A military power beyond conception

Lion Feuchtwanger: The privilege, the courage of fighting for peace

Lion Feuchtwanger: Service at the front gave him a burning hatred for militarism

Lion Feuchtwanger: There is no greater crime than an unnecessary war

Lion Feuchtwanger: War to make the world safe for democracy

Padraic Fiacc: Credo Credo

Padraic Fiacc: Der Bomben Poet

Johann Gottlieb Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace

Eugene Field and Thorne Smith: Bacchus disables Mars

Henry Fielding: An alternative to heaps of mangled and murdered human bodies

Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors

Henry Fielding: War creates the professors of human blood-shedding

Anne Finch: Enquiry After Peace

F. Scott Fitzgerald: War comes to Princeton

Gustave Flaubert and George Sand: Monstrous conflicts of which we have no idea; warfare suppressed or civilization perishes

Florus: Scattering the flames of war over the whole world

Florus: World war, something worse than war

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle: Planet blessed with love but decimated by war

Ford Maddox Ford: Millions massacred for picturesque phrases in politicians’ speeches

Ford Maddox Ford: Preparing men likes bullocks for the slaughterhouse

Mary Weston Fordham: Ode to Peace

E.M. Forster: The Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer.

E.M. Forster: Wars spurred on by persistent talk of war, amplified by the gutter press

Paul Fort: The Complaint of the Soldiers

Charles Fourier: If ever war was deplorable, it is at this moment

Anatole France: Selections on war

Anatole France: Attack the monster that devours our race; make war on war, a war to the death

Anatole France: Barracks are a hideous invention of modern times

Anatole France: Brutal impulse which has led and still leads one half of humanity to destroy the other

Anatole France: Ceaselessly repeating that war is abominable, avoiding all the tortuous intrigues which might provoke it

Anatole France: Country living under shadow of war is easy to govern

Anatole France: Education and War

Anatole France: Emerging painfully from primitive barbarism, war

Anatole France: The ethics of war

Anatole France: Even war depends on the arts of peace

Anatole France: Financiers only wanted colonial wars and the people did not want any wars at all

Anatole France: “He left us impoverished and depopulated, but he gave us glory”

Anatole France: How the U.S. Congress deliberates on wars

Anatole France: In civilised nations the glory of massacre is the greatest glory known

Anatole France: Letter to an advocate of “peace with victory”

Anatole France: Military service the most terrible pest of civilised nations

Anatole France: Modern Romans, the Americanization of the world

Anatole France: Moved by the spectacle of the miseries and crimes of war

Anatole France: No one has right to kill, just man will refuse to draw his number for war

Anatole France: Nobel Prize speech

Anatole France: Only two ways out of militarism – war and bankruptcy

Anatole France: Restoring order by means of theft, rape, pillage, murder and incendiarism

Anatole France: They prefer war to work, they would rather kill each other than help each other

Anatole France: The tutelary gods of world war

Anatole France: Wait till the warriors you make gods of swallow you all up

Anatole France: War brings to the victor himself but ruin and misery, is nothing but a horrible and stupid crime

Anatole France: War, burlesque masquerade in which fatuous patriots sing stupid dithyrambs

Anatole France: War debases man beneath the level of ferocious beasts

Anatole France: War is committing all crimes by which an individual dishonours himself: arson, robbery, rape, murder

Anatole France: War is the last redoubt of oligarchy, plutocracy

Anatole France: Wars fought over territorial acquisition, commercial rivalries

Anatole France: War ruins all trades but its own

Anatole France: “What you call murder and robbery may really be war and conquest, sacred foundations of empires”

Anatole France: Whether civil or foreign, war is execrable

Anatole France: Why should not humanity abolish the law of murder?

Anatole France on Victor Hugo: People to substitute justice and peace for war and bloodshed

Anatole France on Émile Zola, military terrorism and world peace

Anatole France and Michel Corday: The press fans the flames of war’s blast furnace

Anatole France and Michel Corday: Threat of annihilation in gigantic Armageddon

Anatole France and Michel Corday: War is a crime, for which victory brings no atonement

Bruno Frank: Mercenaries lay coffinless in their thousands; terribly easy for princes to carry on their wars

Ivan Franko: Even the dove has the blood of men on its snowy white wings

James George Frazer: Purifying the defilement of war

James George Frazer: Saturn’s reign of peace

Harold Frederic: War inflicts stifling political conformity

Robert Freeman: Peace on Earth

French writers on war and peace

Philip Freneau: Death smiles alike at battles lost or won

Philip Freneau: The Prospect of Peace

Fronto: Devotion to peace 

Henry Blake Fuller: Killed and wounded on the fields of hate

Margaret Fuller: America, with no prouder emblem than the Dove

Thomas Fuller: As though there were not enough men-murdering engines

Thomas Fuller: When all the world might smile in perfect peace

Richard Furness: Selections on war

Richard Furness: Death and demons laugh’d in horrid joy

Richard Furness: The plough and the sword

Richard Furness: War and Love

Richard Furness: Whatever monster rose to mar the happiness of earth by war

Richard Furness: Who wasted earth with sword and flame and murdered millions for a name

F. Benjamin Gage: The Sword and the Plough

John Galsworthy: Selections on war

John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare

John Galsworthy: Achieving perpetual peace by securing the annihilation of our common enemies

John Galsworthy: Air war leads to reverse evolution

John Galsworthy: Friend becomes foe with war psychosis

John Galsworthy: Grandiloquent phrases are the very munitions of war

John Galsworthy: History, made up of wars and intrigues which have originated in the brains of public men

John Galsworthy: The monstrous injustice of conflating chauvinism with common drunkenness

John Galsworthy: No one who disagrees with me must say anything if we are to save the cause of freedom and humanity

John Galsworthy: On the drawbacks of uttering pro-war cant

John Galsworthy: On the embarrassing consequences of bellicose pontification

John Galsworthy: Only a helpless or wicked God would allow the slaughter of millions

John Galsworthy: The procreative demands of war

John Galsworthy: The pure essence of humanitarian warfare sentiments

John Galsworthy: Rivers of blood and tears. When would killing go out of fashion?

John Galsworthy: Trading in fanatical idiocy at expense of others’ blood and sweat

John Galsworthy: Valley of the Shadow

John Galsworthy: War and the microbe of fatalism

John Galsworthy: The war brought in ugliness

John Galsworthy: The war made us all into barbarians

John Galsworthy: War moves mankind towards the manly and unforgiving vigour of the tiger and the rat

John Galsworthy: “The war! The cursed war!”

John Galsworthy: War, where Christ is daily crucified a million times over

John Galsworthy: Would they never tire of making mincemeat of the world?

Rasul Gamzatov: For women war is never over

Rasul Gamzatov: Lament for a slain brother

Maya Ganina: Peace and homeland

Gabriel García Márquez: Five wars and seventeen military coups

Hamlin Garland: Cog in a vast machine for killing men

David Garnett: Criminal to welcome war

David Garnett: War is the worst of the epidemic diseases which afflict mankind

Vsevolod Garshin: Four Days

Théophile Gautier: One could imagine oneself in the Golden Age of Peace

John Gay: Parallel lives. Highwaymen and soldiers.

Thomas Gent: Sonnet to Peace

Stefan George: Monsters of lead and iron, tubes and rods escape their maker’s hand and rage unruly

German writers on peace and war

C. Virgil Gheorghiu: Armies composed of mercenaries fighting for the consolidation of robot society

C. Virgil Gheorghiu: In order to achieve victory the earth has been strewn with the bodies of innocent men, women, and children

C. Virgil Gheorghiu: Third World War, the first true world war in history

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: Selections from the Peace Sonnets

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: The blessed salve of peace for the whole bleeding world

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: Crown him with many crowns, the Prince of Peace

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: I sing the soldiers of the coming wars, those that save and heal

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: Speak peace, that thou and all the lands may live, ere thou and they all perish by the sword!

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: They say they are of Christ and do the works of Cain

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: War is the mailèd hand of criminal states

Jessie Wiseman Gibbs: We feed bread of our children to the war-god’s greed

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Selections on war

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: The Bayonet

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Between The Lines

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: The Conscript

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Dance of death

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: He who killed men in foreign lands bore my name

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Nine O’Clock News

André Gide: Transformation of a war supporter

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Flag of Peace

Mary Putnam Gilmore: Sweet Peace is Here

Jean Giono: Led to the slaughterhouse

Jean Giono: Rats and worms were the only living things

Jean Giono: War, nourishment and dismemberment

Jean Giono: War! Who’s the madman in charge of all this? Who’s the madman who gives the orders?

George Gissing: Selections on war

George Gissing: “Civilisation rests upon a military basis”

George Gissing: Culpable fatalism: war is assured by perpetual prophecies of statesmen and journalists

George Gissing: Games and war

George Gissing: The imposition of military servitude

George Gissing: Large-scale murder as fair sport

George Gissing: Letter to a son killed in war: War is a horrible thing that ought to be left to savages

George Gissing: Lord of Slaughter commands curse of universal soldiering

George Gissing: The morbid love of war

George Gissing: Next stage in civilization: peace made a religion

George Gissing: A parable on war, industry and the press

George Gissing: Peace, no word more beautiful

George Gissing: War turns science into enemy of man

George Gissing: When the next great war comes, newspapers will be the chief cause of it

Ellen Glasgow: Selections on war

Ellen Glasgow: The Altar of the War God

Ellen Glasgow: His vision of the future only an endless warfare and a wasted land

Ellen Glasgow: The Reign of the Brute

Ellen Glasgow: “That killed how many? how many?”

Ellen Glasgow: Then the rows of dead men stared at him through the falling rain in the deserted field

Édouard Glissant: The planet is riddled with wars

William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood

Ferdynand Goetel: Hands off our home, you tracking murderers! Hands off our brains and hearts!

Ferdynand Goetel: Men ripped up by the Moloch of war

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: I have not a warlike nature nor warlike tastes

Goethe: “O wisdom, thou speakest as a dove!”

Goethe: Withdraw hands from your swords

Nikolai Gogol: The dove not seeing the hawk. War in the Ukraine

Oliver Goldsmith: Selections on war

Oliver Goldsmith: A thousand hecatombs for mere trumperies. Imperial contest that no honest man can wish either side wins.

Oliver Goldsmith on war: Hundreds of thousands killed without consequence

Oliver Goldsmith: I am an enemy to nothing in this good world but war

Oliver Goldsmith: To make one man happy is more truly great than having ten thousand captives groaning at the wheels of his chariot

Oliver Goldsmith: War and its servile press

Edmond de Goncourt: Despite civilization, brute force asserts itself as in the time of Attila

Edmond de Goncourt: Even more horrible than the wounds of battle

Edmond de Goncourt: Scenes of siege amid the horrors of war

Adam Lindsay Gordon: Bellona

Maxim Gorky: Selections on war

Maxim Gorky on Romain Rolland, war and humanism

Maxim Gorky to H.G. Wells: Cleanse from the hearts of children the blood-stained rust of horrible and senseless war

Maxim Gorky: The fatal consequences of ignoring military protocol

Maxim Gorky: Generals and substitutes for monkeys

Maxim Gorky: Henri Barbusse and the mass of lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, dirt and blood called war

Maxim Gorky: Military museum; soaking the dirt and dust of the earth with copious blood

Maxim Gorky: Military Tower of Babel

Maxim Gorky: Only time to train cannon fodder, not soldiers

Maxim Gorky: Perfidious Albion at war

Maxim Gorky: “That’s what war is for – to seize foreign land or depopulate one’s own”

Maxim Gorky: The true motives of war

Maxim Gorky: War and Civilization

Maxim Gorky: War, cunning in its stupidity

Maxim Gorky: War permits destruction of every kind: losing limbs fighting for our country

Maxim Gorky: What in war is honorable, in peacetime is criminal

Maxim Gorky: What we needed was a successful war – with anybody at all

Maxim Gorky: When “cause of freedom for man” means money for armaments

Maxim Gorky: With arming of vast hordes of people, what can I get out of the war?

Maxim Gorky: World war and racial conflict on an obscure, infinitesimal planet

Edmund Gosse: War and the brutalities of the real thing

Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism

Remy de Gourmont: If they wage war, in what state must the world be?

John Gower: Peace is chief of all world’s wealth, war is mother of all wrongs

Baltasar Gracián: Who are the true conquerors?

Albert-Paul Granier: The deadweight cortege of death grinds past

Daniil Granin: A scientist’s lament

Robert Graves: Selections on war

Robert Graves: Accommodations for a million men killed in war

Robert Graves: A certain cure for lust of blood

Robert Graves: Even its opponents don’t survive war

Robert Graves: The grim arithmetic of war

Robert Graves: Men at arms and men of letters, the birth of English pacifism in the First World War

Robert Graves: Military madness degenerating into savagery

Robert Graves: Peace

Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next

Robert Graves: War follows its victims back home

Robert Graves: War should be a sport for men above forty-five only

Robert Graves: War’s path of death, decay and decomposition

Robert Graves: War’s ultimate victors, the rats

Robert Graves: When even war’s gallows humor fails

Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war

Thomas Gray: Poetry subdues war

Greek and Roman writers on war and peace

Graham Greene: He carried the war in his heart, infecting everything

Graham Greene: A hundred English Guernicas

Graham Greene: Letter On NATO Threat To Cuba

Graham Greene: None of us can hate any more – or love. You have to feel something to stop a war.

Robert Greene: Then the stormy threats of wars shall cease

Fulke Greville: The shames of peace are the pride of war

Nordahl Grieg: War is contempt for life

Friedrich Melchior von Grimm: History lauds brutal warriors, views the peaceful with contempt

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen: Soldiers and peasants

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen: Study and let war alone

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen: The war-god Mars sat over all Europe

Alexander Grin: A hellish nightmare, or rather a horrible reality

Alexander Grin: How a little girl stopped a world war

Alexander Grin: How two leaders ended war

Hugo Grotius: Provoking no wars, invading no countries, spoiling no neighbors to aggrandize themselves

Edgar Guest: The Peaceful Warriors

Jorge Guillén: The monsters have passed over

Jorge Guillén: Rest peacefully, free of our presences

Nicolás Guillén: Come, dove, come tell me the tale of your woe

Louise Imogen Guiney: The voice of Peace

Pentti Haanpää: War suits only such people as want to die

Hans Habe: Constituent battles of the Third World War. You can’t pick your battlefields once war is in progress.

Hans Habe: Hiroshima-born realization of man’s destructibility by man

Hans Habe: John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered

Hermann Hagedorn: Selections against war

Hermann Hagedorn: The fourth estate turning the thoughts of our children to war

Hermann Hagedorn: How to engineer a war

Hermann Hagedorn: Leave God out of the game!

Hermann Hagedorn: Slaughter! And voices, begging shrill the merciful grace of death.

Hermann Hagedorn; There’s nothing like a war to make a man president

James Norman Hall: Broken, bleeding bodies with all their beauty gone

Hala Jean Hammond: War’s black hatred

Peter Handke: The horror unleashed by NATO’s first war

Philip M. Harding: White Feather

Thomas Hardy: Selections on war

Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified

Thomas Hardy: As war-waste classed

Thomas Hardy: The battle-god is god no more

Thomas Hardy: Channel Firing

Thomas Hardy: Ever consign all Lords of War to sleep

Thomas Hardy: How long must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these?

Thomas Hardy: The Man He Killed

Thomas Hardy: Vaster battalions press for further strands to argue in the self-same bloody mode

Thomas Hardy: War’s annals will fade into night

C. F. Harper: Song of the Battleships

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Selections on peace and war

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Furl the banners stained with blood, ’till war shall be no more

Frances Ellen Harper Watkins: Grant that peace and joy and gladness may like holy angels tread

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Home from war

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Music to soothe all sorrow till war and crime shall cease

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Peace till war and crime shall cease

Frank Harris: Soulless selfishness of war; Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness greatest danger to Humanity

Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war

Charles Yale Harrison: Selections on war

Charles Yale Harrison: Bombardment, maniacal congealed hatred

Charles Yale Harrison: This is called an artillery duel

Charles Yale Harrison: Two kinds of people in the world, those who like wars and those who fight them

Charles Yale Harrison: War and really murdering someone

Charles Yale Harrison: War is a hell that no god, however cruel, would fashion for his most deadly enemies

Charles Yale Harrison: War’s snarling, savage beasts

Charles Yale Harrison: War’s whispered reminder, you must come back to my howling madness

Charles Yale Harrison: We have learned who our enemies are

Charles Yale Harrison: Who can comfort whom in war? The mother of the man who died at the end of my bayonet

Ernest Hartsock: Let Mars and all his mangled mourners pass

Ernest Hartsock: Who told you God raises sons to slay them all in battle?

Jaroslav Hašek: Bathe in the blood of the enemy and slaughter them all as Herod did the babies

Jaroslav Hašek: Systematized, systematic system for writing of anticipatory war glories

Gerhart Hauptmann: American politics and warships

W. T. Hawkins: A Song of Peace

Julian Hawthorne: Why soldiers become prison guards

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selections on war

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Did iron-hearted War itself ever do so hard and cruel a thing as this before?

Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Every warlike achievement involves an amount of physical and moral evil

Nathaniel Hawthorne: How glorious it would have been if our forefathers could have kept the country unspotted with blood!

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Slaughter’s way. No laurel wreath can wake the silent dead.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: War personified; red cheek emblem of fire and sword; blackness of other betokened mourning that attends them

William Hazlitt: Selections on war

William Hazlitt: And this is patriotism. Practitioners of eternal war.

William Hazlitt: Difference between a war-expenditure and what ought to be a peace-establishment

William Hazlitt: Effects of war and taxes

William Hazlitt: Harpies of the press. Juggling fiends. Systematic opponents of peace. Ceaseless partisans of interminable hostilities.

William Hazlitt: High-priests of Moloch foam at the mouth at the name of peace

William Hazlitt: Keystone of indestructible war-system: Closing up the avenues to peace, shutting the gates of mercy on mankind

William Hazlitt: Poets outlive conquerors

William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war

William Hazlitt: Ultima ratio regum: liberals and conservatives united by leaden bullets and steel bayonets

William Hazlitt: War is in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals

Verner von Heidenstam: The cloth versus khaki

Willi Heinrich: If the women had their own way there would be the death penalty for making or bearing arms

Willi Heinrich: “It’s quite enough that I know it”

Willi Heinrich: A people proud of its war dead has learned nothing from war

Felicia Hemans: Selections on peace and war

Felicia Hemans: Say to the hurricane of war, – “Be still”

Felicia Hemans: Speak not of death, till thou hast looked on such

Felicia Hemans: A thousand voices echo “Peace!”

Felicia Hemans: Thousands doomed to moan, condemned by war to hopeless grief unknown

Felicia Hemans: War and Peace

Felicia Hemans: War has still ravaged o’er the blasted plain

Ernest Hemingway: Selections on war

Ernest Hemingway: All armies are the same

Ernest Hemingway: Beaten to start with, beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army

Ernest Hemingway: Champs d’Honneur

Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war

Ernest Hemingway: “Down with the officers. Viva la Pace!”

Ernest Hemingway: “If everybody would not attack the war would be over”

Ernest Hemingway: “It doesn’t finish. There is no finish to a war.”

Ernest Hemingway: Nothing sacred about war’s stockyards

Ernest Hemingway: Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever.

Ernest Hemingway: There are people who would make war, there are other people who would not make war

Ernest Hemingway: Who wins wars?

O. Henry: The ethics of justifiable slaughter

George Herbert: Make war to cease

Johann Gottfried von Herder: Selections on war

Johann Gottfried von Herder: Disturbing the peace of the world for domestic benefits

Johann Gottfried von Herder: Divine law ordains more doves and sheep than lions and tigers

Johann Gottfried Herder: Hardly dare name or write the terrible word “war”

Johann Gottfried Herder: Peace, not war, is the natural state of mankind

Johann Gottfried von Herder: War springs from war and gives rise to another in turn

José-Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring

Miguel Hernández: Wretched Wars

Herodian: Accommodating the military, selling an empire

Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace

Mary Heron: Bid brazen-throated war and discord cease

Mary Heron: Ode on the General Peace

Robert Herrick: The Olive Branch

Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace

Alexander Herzen: Selections on the military and war

Alexander Herzen: As soon as a boy can walk, he is given a toy sword to train him to murder

Alexander Herzen: Barracks, the most inhuman condition in which men live. An exhibition of generals.

Alexander Herzen: Blood replaced by tears, the field of battle by forgotten tombs

Alexander Herzen: Chthonic passions, heathen patriotism fuel war

Alexander Herzen: Despotism means military discipline, empires mean war

Alexander Herzen: The frenzied anxiety, the exhausted satiety that lead to war

Alexander Herzen: Inhumanity of army discipline, flunky of a crowned soldier

Alexander Herzen: Middle class idyll impossible with half a million bayonets clamoring for “work”

Alexander Herzen: Six hundred thousand animated machines with bayonets. Military caste divides the people into two nations

Alexander Herzen: The type of military commander in whom everything social and moral, everything human has died out

Alexander Herzen: War and “international law”

Alexander Herzen: War, duel between nations; duel, war between individuals

Alexander Herzen: What the military calls work

Hesiod: Lamentable works of Ares lead to dank house of Hades

Maurice Hewlett: In the Trenches

Maurice Hewlett: O, this war, what a glorious game!

Maurice Hewlett: Who prayeth peace?

Stefan Heym: Sure it’s a vicious circle, it’s war

Stefan Heym: The whole scene was immersed in the silence of absolute death

Stefan Heym: The world market…making new wars

Amanda M. Hicks: A Truce for the Toilers

Nazim Hikmet: The Little Girl

Nazim Hikmet: Sad kind of freedom, free to be an American air base

Leslie Pinckney Hill: The patriotism of pacifism

Thomas Hobbes: Divine law is the fulfilling of peace

Thomas Hobbes: There was never such a time of war all over the world

Thomas Hobbes: War, where every man is enemy to every man

Martha Lavinia Hoffman: The Song of Peace

James Hogg: Few such monsters can mankind endure: The fields are heaped with dead and dying.

James Hogg: Millions have bled that sycophants may rule

Ludvig Holberg: Military modesty and candor

Thomas Holcroft: In wars and wretchedness I cannot say that I delight

Thomas Holcroft: Reaping vast crops of famine, sword, and fire

Friedrich Hölderlin: Celebration of Peace

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Not so enamored of the drum and trumpet

Homer: Caging the terrible Lord of War

Homer: The great gods are never pleased with violent deeds

Homer: Mars, most unjust, most odious of all the gods

Oles Honchar: Orchards of peace

Oles Honchar: The ponderous, stupefying word “War”

Thomas Hood: As gentle as sweet heaven’s dew beside the red and horrid drops of war

Thomas Hood: Freelance soldiering

Thomas Hood: When war has ceased with all its Ills, Captains should come like sucking Doves, With Olive Branches in their Bills

A. D. Hope: Inscription for a War

Gerard Manley Hopkins: What pure peace allows alarms of wars?

Horace: Let there be a limit to warfare

Horace: Transcending war

John Horn: False Ideas About War and Peace

Ödön von Horváth: We must prepare them to be warriors. Just that.

Julia Ward Howe: The Development of the Peace Ideal

Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870

William Dean Howells: Selections on war

William Dean Howells: Editha

William Deans Howells: Everyday sacrifices.”I don’t want to see any more men killed in my time.”

William Dean Howells: If we have war, every good cause will be set back

William Dean Howells to Henry James: The most stupid and causeless war

William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War

William Dean Howells: On Mark Twain and war

William Dean Howells to Mark Twain: War for humanity turned into war for coal-stations

William Dean Howells: War Stops Literature

William Dean Howells: Warmongers should tremble when they remember that God is just

William Dean Howells: Wilson’s Mexican war, wickeder than that of 1846

W. H. Hudson: A mother’s plea

Langston Hughes: A mighty army serving human kind, not an army geared to kill

Victor Hugo: Selections on war

Victor Hugo: At last, a peaceful strain!

Victor Hugo: The black eagle waits with claws outspread

Victor Hugo: Brute war, dire birth of hellish race

Victor Hugo: Common-sense opposition to war

Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats

Victor Hugo: From fratricide to fraternity

Victor Hugo: Glorious war does not exist; peace, that sublime, universal desire

Victor Hugo: The history of war and the history of peace

Victor Hugo: I prefer poet to marshals’ cannonade

Victor Hugo: The inkstand is to destroy the sword

Victor Hugo: International Peace Congress 1851

Victor Hugo: Peace will supersede war, perhaps sooner than people think

Victor Hugo: The poet outlives the man of war

Victor Hugo: War, made by humanity against humanity, despite humanity

Victor Hugo: What greater aim could there be than civilization through peace?

David Hume: War’s double standards

James Huneker: Remy de Gourmont and philosophic abhorrence of war

Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen

Leigh Hunt: The devilish drouth of the cannon’s ever-gaping mouth

Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen

Francis Hutcheson: To poets, war is impetuous, cruel, undistinguishing monster

Frank Walcott Hutt: The Peace Congress

Aldous Huxley: Selections on war

Aldous Huxley: Absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by war

Aldous Huxley: All devote themselves methodically and scientifically to general massacre and wholesale destruction

Aldous Huxley: The first of the political causes of war is war itself

Aldous Huxley: How are we to get rid of war when we celebrate militarists?

Aldous Huxley: Imposition of permanent military servitude upon the masses

Aldous Huxley: Manufacturing of arms, an intrinsically abominable practice

Aldous Huxley: Nuclear weapons, establishing world domination for one’s gang

Aldous Huxley: One cannot be ruler of militaristic society without being militarist oneself

Aldous Huxley: Peace of the world frequently endangered in order that oil magnates might grow a little richer

Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war

Aldous Huxley: Science, technology harnessed to the chariot of war

Aldous Huxley: Scientific workers must take action against war

Aldous Huxley: Shifting people’s attention in world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit

Aldous Huxley: War is mass murder organized in cold blood

Aldous Huxley: War is not a law of nature, nor even of human nature

Aldous Huxley: War is now the affair of every man, woman and child in the community

Aldous Huxley: War shatters precarious crust of civilization, precipitates vast numbers of human beings into abyss of misery and frenzied diabolism

Joris-Karl Huysmans: An Apocalypse of wars

Elizabeth Inchbald: War, a choice of words

Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”

Jean Ingelow: Methought the men of war were even as gods

Irish writers on peace and war

Washington Irving: The laudable spirit of military emulation. Soldiers, poor animals

Washington Irving: Most pacific nation in the world? Rather the most warlike

Washington Irving: The renown not purchased by deeds of violence and blood

Isocrates: Addicted to war, lusting after imperial power

Isocrates: War zealots plunge state into manifold disasters

Avetik Issahakian: Eternal fabricators of war, erecting pyramids with a myriad skulls

Panaït Istrati: Crusades profit neither those who fight, nor the cause for which they have gone to war

Panaït Istrati: Warmakers and toadeaters

Italian writers on war and militarism

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: The word pax, pax, pax

Henry James: Beguiled into thinking war, worst horror that attends the life of nations, could not recur

Henry James: No more sacrifice on the altar of war

Henry James: War, the waste of life and time and money

William James: Selections on war

William James: At the least temptation all the old military passions rise and sweep everything before them

William James: The horrors of a war of conquest

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War

William James: Party of civilization must oppose increase of military might

William James: The Philippine Tangle

William James: A sweet little place. One never sees a soldier.

St. James: Where do the wars among you come from?

Jules Janin: War aborts orators and writers, bears soldiers

Jules Janin: War needs blood and gold

Randall Jarrell: In bombers named for girls, we burned the cities we had learned about in school

Théodore Jean: The God of War

Richard Jefferies: The raven, a fable

Robinson Jeffers: Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind

James Jennings: Reign goddess, Peace, throughout eternal years

Soame Jenyns: One good-natured act more praises gain than armies overthrown, and thousands slain

Soame Jenyns: The soldier’s scarlet glowing from afar shows his bloody occupation’s war

Jerome: We must seek peace if we are to avoid wars

Jerome K. Jerome: Go for a soldier

Robert Underwood Johnson: The fairest of daughters, heavenly Peace

Rossiter Johnson: Infinitely better to learn how to avert war

Rossiter Johnson: Where swell the songs thou shouldst have sung by peaceful rivers yet to flow?

Samuel Johnson: Selections on war

Samuel Johnson: I to nobler themes aspire

Samuel Johnson: Reason frowns on War’s unequal game

Samuel Johnson: The violence of war admits no distinction

Samuel Johnson: War is heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved

Samuel Johnson: War is the extremity of evil

Mór Jókai: Bellona is a fair woman. Rain follows all battles.

Mór Jókai: In the soldier’s march to glory each step is a human corpse

Mór Jókai: War’s patriotic pelf: a slaughtered army tells no tales

Henry Jones: Bid discord cease, and open wide the gates of peace

Josephus: Admonition against war

Joseph Joubert on war: All victors will be defeated

Attila József: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win

Julian: Reforming the evils that war has caused

Justin: There would then assuredly be fewer wars in all ages and countries

Justin Martyr: We who formerly murdered one another now refrain from making war upon our enemies

Juvenal: Mighty warriors and their tombs are circumscribed by Fate

Juvenal: The spoils of war and the price thereof

Juvenal: War and violence, baser than the beasts

Juvenal: Weigh the greatest military commanders in the balance

Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace

Georgi Karaslavov: War’s fratricide, how commonplace and yet how terrible

Frigyes Karinthy: Lost his mind on the battlefield, thought he knew what he was fighting for

Frigyes Karinthy: Started war of self-defense by attacking neighbor

Veniamin Kaverin: A dream of war

Yuri Kazakov: If only there was no war

Nikos Kazantzakis: Francis of Assisi

John Keats: Days innocent of scathing war

John Keats: The fierce intoxicating tones of trumpets, drums and cannon

John Keats: Sonnet on Peace

Harry Kemp: I Sing the Battle

Albert Fenner Kercheval: Peace sheds her silvery light on all compass points

Joseph Kessel: In my family, war is in the blood…the blood of others

Joseph Kessel: The monstrous ululation of an air-raid siren

Joseph Kessel: War’s ultimate fratricide, killed for not killing

Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war

Harriet King: Life is Peace

Charles Kingsley: Empire, a system of world-wide robbery, and church

Charles Kingsley: Tyrannising it luxuriously over all nations, she had sat upon the mystic beast

Henry Kirke White: Far better music inspire peace than war

Henry Kirke White: The red-eyeballed warrior doomed to ruin

Hans Hellmut Kirst: Selections on war and peace

Hans Hellmut Kirst: Each thinks it’s in the right, each wants peace and only wishes to defend itself

Hans Hellmut Kirst: Goose-Stepping for NATO

Hans Hellmut Kirst: It was as if the whole world had become simply one vast graveyard

Hans Hellmut Kirst: “Just a dirty, rotten business from beginning to end”

Hans Hellmut Kirst: Nothing – absolutely nothing – can justify war

Frederic Lawrence Knowles: The New Age. The victory which is peace.

Vsevolod Kochetov: Peace is the future happiness of mankind

Vladimir Korolenko: Final judgment

Zofia Kossak: Every creature has its day. War and crocodiles.

Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky: Man the despoiler, man the slayer

Vadim Kozhevnikov: “We seized power from women and there’s been war ever since”

Karl Kraus: Selections on war

Karl Kraus: Aphorisms and obloquies on war

Karl Kraus: This is world war. This is my manifesto to mankind.

Karl Kraus: The evolution of humanitarian bombing

Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind

Karl Kraus: The Warmakers

Karl Kraus: War renders unto Caesar that which is God’s

Karl Kraus: In war, business is business

Karl Kraus: Wire dispatches are instruments of war

Karl Kraus: The vampire generation; prayer in wartime

Raymond Kresensky: When patriotism is pushing propaganda for war

Alexander Kuprin: Selections on war

Alexander Kuprin: Deciphering the military metaphysic

Alexander Kuprin: The human race has had its childhood – a time of incessant and bloody war

Alexander Kuprin: Mounds and mountains of corpses under which moan the dying

Alexander Kuprin: What is war after all? Perhaps it is nothing more than a mistake made by all, a universal error, a madness.

Alexander Kuprin: The whole science of war exists only because humanity will not, or cannot, or dare not, say, ‘I won’t.’

Jean de La Bruyère: And self-slaughtering man dares call animals brutes

La Bruyère on the lust for war

La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?

Julien Offray de La Mettrie: Wars are the plague of the human race

La Rochefoucauld: The petty causes of great wars

José-André Lacour: War’s sanguinary peacock

Jacques de Lacretelle: War’s atavistic brigands

Lactantius: Selections on war

Lactantius: The arms of the nations shall be burnt; and now there shall be no war, but peace and everlasting rest

Lactantius: Duties relating to warfare are accommodated neither to justice nor to true virtue

Lactantius: Justice had no other reason for leaving the earth than the shedding of human blood

Lactantius: No one can befittingly describe the cruelty of this beast, which rages with iron teeth throughout the world

Lactantius: The pernicious and impious madness of deifying warlike generals who have inundated plains with blood

Lactantius: Sacrificing to the gods of war

Lactantius: War, object of execration, and its domestic analogue

Pär Lagerkvist: If such a thing as war can end

Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.

Selma Lagerlöf: The mark of death was on them all

Alphonse de Lamartine: Mercenaries, taking others’ lives for hire

Lamartine: The republic of peace

Charles Lamb: More-wasting War, insatiable of blood

Wilhelm Lamszus: The Human Slaughter-House

Walter Savage Landor: Some stopped revenge athirst for slaughter

Sidney Lanier: Selections on war

Sidney Lanier: Blood-red flower of war, whose odors strangle a people, whose roots are in hell

Sidney Lanier: Death in Eden

Sidney Lanier: Dialogue on the war-flower

Sidney Lanier: War by other means

Sidney Lanier: The wind blew all the vanes in the country in one way – toward war

Latin American writers on war and peace

D. H. Lawrence: Selections on war

D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul

D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil

D. H. Lawrence: If they do not kill him in this war

D.H. Lawrence: In 1915 the world ended with the slaughter-machine of human devilishness

D. H. Lawrence: No romance of war. The soul did not heal.

D.H. Lawrence: The price to pay at home for terrible, terrible war

D.H. Lawrence: War adds horror to horror, becomes horrible piratic affair, dirty sort of freebooting

Henry Lawson: And all the nations of the world prepare for war again!

Halldór Laxness: In war there is no cause except the cause of war. A bitter disappointment when it turned out they could defend themselves

Halldór Laxness: There are ideals in war too, slaughtering men by the million

Halldór Laxness: Three questions about war on earth and in heaven

J.M.G. Le Clézio: This is what war is

Richard Le Gallienne: Selections on war

Richard Le Gallienne: Christ at Notre Dame: abhorred be they who ever draw again the sword

Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War

Richard Le Gallienne: Is this to be strong, ye nations, your vulgar battles to fight?

Richard Le Gallienne: A nation is merely a big fool with an army

Richard Le Gallienne: Poetry and war

Richard Le Gallienne: The Rainbow

Ruth Le Prade: Out of Chaos

Stephen Leacock: In the Good Time After the War

Stephen Leacock: Merry Christmas.

Stephen Leacock: The war mania of middle age and embonpoint

Stephen Leacock: War-Time Christmas

Joseph Lee: German Prisoners

Vernon Lee: Satan’s rules of war

Lily Alice Lefevre: The Bridge of Peace

Derrick Norman Lehmer: Militarism

Marie Lenéru: War is not human fate

William Ellery Leonard: The Pied Piper

Leonid Leonov: All the blood that has been shed has turned the air bad

Leonid Leonov: Tell me, is it right to kill – in war or anyhow?

Mikhail Lermontov: Still you’re fighting: Why, what for?

Gaston Leroux: Poet and soldier

Alain-René Lesage: A military braggart and his opposite

Nikolai Leskov: Immorality

Doris Lessing: With war every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains

Charles Lever: The self-serving drunken oblivion of war

C. S. Lewis: The folly and danger of noble and humanitarian war

Sinclair Lewis: Selections on war

Sinclair Lewis: Can’t depend on Providence to supply wars when you need them

Sinclair Lewis: College education makes soldiers more patriotic, flag-waving, and skillful in the direction of slaughter

Sinclair Lewis: The democracy of death

Sinclair Lewis: The disguised increase, false economizing of war budgets

Sinclair Lewis: Don’t much care what kind of war they prepare for

Sinclair Lewis: For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on arming itself more and more…for peace!

Sinclair Lewis: General: State of peace far worse than war

Sinclair Lewis: Get us into war just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going

Sinclair Lewis: Inevitable war with Canada, Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Japan, or perhaps Staten Island

Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here

Sinclair Lewis: The only thing not absurd about wars was that they kill a good many millions of people

Sinclair Lewis: Other Unavoidable Wars to End All Wars

Sinclair Lewis: Pining for a good war

Li Bai: Nefarious War

Libanius: Rulers more popular for granting mercy than possessing multitudes of soldiers

Libanius: War in time of peace

Isabella Lickbarrow: Invocation To Peace

Jack Lindsay: The Scared Men

Jack Lindsay: Who Will Dare Look This Child in the Eyes?

Vachel Lindsay: Speak Now for Peace

Vachel Lindsay: Tolstoi, that angel of peace

Vachel Lindsay: The Unpardonable Sin

Martha Shepard Lippincott: Nations now for mammon fight

Martha Shepard Lippincott: Peace on Earth

Martha Shepard Lippincott: Shame will fall upon us for barbarous deeds of war

Livy: On the political utility of starting unprovoked wars

Livy: Waging war against all rights human and divine

John Locke: State of war and state of nature are opposites

William J. Locke: Following war

William J. Locke: I’m good at killing things, I ought to have been a soldier

William J. Locke: Life in its fullness and glory, war’s orgies of horror

Jack London: Some day all men will counsel peace. No man will slay his fellow. All men will plant.

Jack London: War

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Forevermore, forevermore, the reign of violence is o’er!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: I am weary of your quarrels, weary of your wars and bloodshed

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals the blast of War’s great organ shakes the skies!

Federico García Lorca: War goes crying with a million gray rats

Pierre Loti: Burying poor young soldiers all guiltless of the mad adventure

Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray: What is called the grand art of war

Samuel Lover: The demon of war casts his shadows before

Samuel Lover: The trumpet and the sword

Amy Lowell: Misericordia

Amy Lowell: A pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?

James Russell Lowell: Selections on war and peace

James Russell Lowell: Dante and universal peace

James Russell Lowell on Lamartine: Highest duty of man, to summon peace when vulture of war smells blood

James Russell Lowell: The military qualifications of a prospective president

James Russell Lowell: Uncle Sam presents his bill for war

James Russell Lowell: A war supporter’s credo

Lu Hsün: Ballads among bushes of bayonets, hungry dove amid crumbling walls

Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die

Lucian: Rejecting war’s seductive appeal

Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole

Lucretius: Lull to a timely rest the savage works of war

Emil Ludwig: Dialogue on “humanitarian war”

Lycophron: Ares, who banquets in gory battles

Ernest Neal Lyon: A Dream of Peace

Lysias: Those who wage war imitate tyrants

Thomas Macaulay: Drive for transatlantic dominion leads to endless wars, empty treasuries

Thomas Macaulay: Loving war for its own sake

Thomas Macaulay: The self-perpetuating role of the army

Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?

George MacDonald: War-cry of every opinion. Battle of the dead.

Machado de Assis: Let the reader decide between the soldier and the priest

Charles Mackay: Awake the song of peace!

Charles Mackay: Hung the sword in the hall, the spear on the wall

Charles Mackay: War in all men’s eyes shall be a monster of iniquity

Archibald MacLeish: The disastrous war, the silent slain

Maurice Maeterlinck: Bloodshed, battle-cry and sword-thrust are the joys of barbarians

Joseph de Maistre: The soldier and the executioner

Nicolas Malebranch: Ignorance, brutality and training for war

André Malraux: Do you think that the army budget is meant to pay for war?

Elizar Maltsev: Suddenly people would discover that there was no war at all

Albert Maltz: A children’s wartime bestiary

Albert Maltz: Conquering the world but losing your son

Albert Maltz: “Ten thousand dead today. That’s what the war means.”

Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die

André Pieyre de Mandiargues: Mercy and Peace squares

Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground

Heinrich Mann: Nietzsche, war and the butchery of ten to twenty million souls

Heinrich Mann: “No! The less force exercised in the world the better!”

Heinrich Mann: Nowadays the real power is peace

Klaus Mann: The whole country was transformed into an armed camp

Thomas Mann: Selections on war

Thomas Mann: By nature evil and harmful, war is destructive even to the victor

Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war

Thomas Mann: Parallel, oracle and warning

Thomas Mann: Tolstoy, a force that could have stopped war

Thomas Mann: War is a blood-orgy of egotism, corruption, and vileness

Thomas Mann: William Faulkner’s love for man, protest against militarism and war

Frederic Manning: War poems

Frederic Manning: Blow, wind! Drown the senseless thunder of the guns.

Frederic Manning: Grotesque

Frederic Manning: Shells hounding through air athirst for blood

Frederic Manning: The Trenches

Frederic Manning: The very mask of God, broken

Frederic Manning: War poems

Alessandro Manzoni: The havoc of war devastated the state

Gabriel Marcel: Modern war is sin itself, the suicide of the human race

Gabriel Marcel: War depersonalizes enemy, dehumanizes self

Gabriel Marcel: War is disaster from which no counterbalancing advantage can be reaped

Marcus Aurelius: Military conquests lead but to the grave

Jacques Maritain: What good one can expect from such a war and its pitiless prolongation?

Edwin Markham: Peace

Edwin Markham: Peace Over Africa

Edwin Markham: Semiramis, the conqueror

Georgi Markov: War is a glutton. Its terrible hunger is never sated.

Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!

Christopher Marlowe: Parricide and filicide. While lions war, poor lambs perish.

José Martí: Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics

Martial: Let the mad be eager for wars and fierce Mars

Martial: So have fallen men

Roger Martin du Gard: Selections on war

Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech

Roger Martin du Gard: All the pageantry of war cannot redeem its beastliness

Roger Martin du Gard: “Anything rather than the madness, the horrors of a war!”

Roger Martin du Gard: Be loyal to yourselves, reject war

Roger Martin du Gard: Deliberately infecting a country with war neurosis

Roger Martin du Gard: “Drop your rifles. Revolt!”

Roger Martin du Gard: General strike for peace

Roger Martin du Gard: A hundredth part of energy expended in war could have preserved peace

Roger Martin du Gard: How make active war on war?

Roger Martin du Gard: Launch against the war-mongers a concerted movement to force the governments to bow to your desire for peace

Roger Martin du Gard: No more dangerous belief can take root in the mind than the belief that war’s inevitable

Roger Martin du Gard: Nothing worse than war and all it involves

Roger Martin du Gard: Romain Rolland

Roger Martin du Gard: Secret commitments which from one day to another may plunge you, every man of you, into the horrors of war

Roger Martin du Gard: A thousand times more honor in preserving peace than waging war

Roger Martin du Gard: Tragedy of war, like that of Oedipus, occurs because warnings are ignored

Roger Martin du Gard: War breeds atmosphere of lies, officials lies

Roger Martin du Gard: War is at our gates, dooming millions of innocent victims to suffering and death

Roger Martin du Gard: War’s “serviceable lie” costs tens of thousands of lives

Roger Martin du Gard: When you refer to war, none of you thinks of the unprecedented slaughter, the millions of innocent victims it involves

Andrew Marvell: War all this doth overgrow

Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear

E. P. Marvin: War Disenchanted

Caroline Atherton Mason: Enemy, oh, let our warfare cease!

William Mason: Il Pacifico: Joys that peace inspires

Gerald Massey: Curst, curst be war, the World’s most fatal glory!

Gerald Massey: Sweet peace comes treading down war’s cruel spears

Philip Massinger: Famine, blood, and death, Bellona’s pages

Philip Massinger: Mustn’t change ploughshares into swords

Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”

Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest

Edgar Lee Masters: The words, Pro Patria, what do they mean, anyway?

Guy de Maupassant: Selections on war

Guy de Maupassant: The army, murdering those who defend themselves, making prisoners of the rest, pillaging in the name of the Sword

Guy de Maupassant: The Horrible

Guy de Maupassant: How and why wars are plotted

Guy de Maupassant: I do not understand how these murderers are tolerated walking on the public streets

Guy de Maupassant: I only pray that our sons may never see any wars again

Guy de Maupassant: Military hysteria, military presumptuousness

Guy de Maupassant: Why does society not rise up bodily in rebellion at the word “war”?

Francois Mauriac: The Bloody Dawn of Peace

Peter Maurin: Disarmament of the heart

André Maurois: The killing machine started up with pitiless smoothness

Vladimir Mayakovsky: Hurl a question to their faces: Why are we fighting?

John McGovern: War: three letters, fifty million plunged into worst misfortune

Thomas McGrath: Poems on war

Thomas McGrath: Against the False Magicians

Thomas McGrath: All the Dead Soldiers

Thomas McGrath: Homecoming

Thomas McGrath: Nocturne Militaire

Thomas McGrath: Ode for the American Dead in Asia

Thomas McGrath: Senators mine our lives for another war

Grenville Mellen: The Lonely Bugle Grieves

Grenville Mellen: Slaughter rides screaming on the vengeful ball

Herman Melville: Selections on peace and war

Herman Melville: All the cruel carnal glory wrought out by naval heroes

Herman Melville: Characterological drawback of consorting with cannon

Herman Melville: Gaining glory by a distinguished slaughtering of their fellow-men

Herman Melville: Gospel lacking practical wisdom of earth – nations at times demanding bloody massacres and wars

Herman Melville: How can a religion of peace flourish in a castle of war?

Herman Melville: In the solace of the Truce of God, the Calumet has come

Herman Melville: Minister of the Prince of Peace serving the God of War

Herman Melville: Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend

Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace

Herman Melville: War-pits and rattraps. Soldier sold to the army as Faust sold himself to the devil.

Herman Melville: When shall the time come, how much longer will God postpone it?

Herman Melville: The whole matter of war is a thing that smites common-sense and Christianity in the face

Albert Memmi: So the war had caught up with us, a celebration in honor of death

Menander: Inglorious military vainglory

H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men

George Meredith: Selections on peace and war

George Meredith: All your gains from War resign

George Meredith: Bellona’s mad halloo

George Meredith: Nations at war are wild beasts

George Meredith: The Olive Branch

George Meredith: On the Danger of War

George Meredith: Think war the finest subject for poets?

George Meredith: War wife, as good as widowed

George Meredith: War’s rivers of blood no crown for future generations

George Meredith: Women and war

Dmitry Merezhkovsky: His God is not at all the God of the Christians, but the ancient, pagan Mars

Prosper Mérimée: Commemorating the heroes of war

Prosper Mérimée: To the shame of humanity, horrors of war have their charm

Robert Merle: The present war, and all the previous wars, and all the wars to come

Robert Merle: There’s no such thing as a just or sacred war

Leonard Merrick: Strange there weren’t more that didn’t think it a virtue to commit murder if you put on khaki

Thomas Merton: Simone Weil and why nations go to war

Lillian Rozell Messenger: Seeking a new world of peace

Lillian Rozell Messenger: Why this feast of shells each day, the fury, blood and wail of war?

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Arnold Schoenberg: Peace on Earth

Alice Meynell: The true slayers are those who sire soldiers

Jules Michelet: My book is a book of peace

Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors

Thomas Middleton: Selections on peace and war

Thomas Middleton: All made to make a peace, and not a war

Thomas Middleton: Blood-quaffing Mars, who wash’d himself in gore

Thomas Middleton: Let them that seek Peace, find Peace and enjoy Peace

Thomas Middleton: O thrice-peaceful souls, whom neither threats nor strife nor wars controls!

Thomas Middleton: The Peacemaker

Thomas Middleton: The soldier’s fate

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Conscientious Objector

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Lament

Emily Huntington Miller: Hymn of Peace

Joaquin Miller: The People’s Song of Peace

John Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy

John Milton: No war or battle’s sound was heard the world around

John Milton: What can war but endless war still breed?

John Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence

Minucius Felix: War and the birth of empire

Octave Mirbeau: Selections on war

Octave Mirbeau: All these wan faces, all these bodies already vanquished – toward what useless and bloody slaughters?

Octave Mirbeau: It was not enough that war should glut itself with human flesh, it was necessary that it should also devour beasts, the earth itself, everything that lived in the calm and peace of labor and love

Octave Mirbeau: An orgy of destruction, criminal and foolish. What was this country, in whose name so many crimes were being committed?

Octave Mirbeau: Stupidly, unconsciously, I had killed a man whom I loved, a man with whom my soul had just identified itself

Octave Mirbeau: A sudden vision of Death, red Death standing on a chariot, drawn by rearing horses, which was sweeping down on us, brandishing his scythe

Octave Mirbeau: To the Soldiers of all Countries

Octave Mirbeau: War, apprenticeship in man-killing

Gabriela Mistral: Dance of Peace

Ruth Comfort Mitchell: He Went for a Soldier

Mary Russell Mitford: Sheath thy gory blade in peace

Harriet Monroe: Over me wash the seas of war

Charles Edward Montague: Selections on war and its aftermath

Charles Edward Montague; Aloof, detached officers lead to thousands of little brown bundles

Charles Edward Montague: The disconcerting bombs of Christian pacifism

Charles Edward Montague: Post-war prescription for peace

Charles Edward Montague: Soldier politician, recruiter of other men for battles that he avoided himself

Charles Edward Montague: War must first slay natural sentiment of brotherhood

Charles Edward Montague: War propaganda leaves bill to be settled in peacetime

Charles Edward Montague: War’s demoralization

Montaigne: Selections on war

Montaigne: Blood on the sword: From slaughter of animals to slaughter of men

Montaigne: God would not favor so unjust an enterprise as insulting and quarreling with another nation for profit

Montaigne: The ignominy of lopsided military conquest

Montaigne: Invasion concerns all men; not so defense: that concerns only the rich

Montaigne: It is enough to dip our pens in ink without dipping them in blood

Montaigne: Monstrous war waged for frivolous reasons

Montaigne: This furious monster war

Montaigne: War, that malady of mankind

Montaigne: War’s fury

Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere

Montesquieu: Distemper of militarism brings nothing but public ruin

Montesquieu: Military glory leads to torrents of blood overspreading the earth

Montesquieu: Wars abroad aggravate conflicts at home

James Montgomery: Selections on war and peace

James Montgomery: Farewell to War

James Montgomery: Fratricidal war speeds on inexorability of Death

James Montgomery: The poet tracks not the warrior’s fiery road

James Montgomery: ‘Twas but a dream. But one word found utterance – “Peace, peace! peace!”

James Montgomery: War, that self-inflicted scourge of man

Robert Montgomery: Field of Death

Robert Montgomery: War

Henry de Montherlant: A constant state of crime against humanity

William Vaughn Moody: Bullet’s scream went wide of its mark to its homeland’s heart

George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine

George Moore: War and disillusionment

Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war

Thomas Moore: Famine comes to glean all that the sword had left unreap’d. A banquet, yet alive, for ravening vultures.

Thomas Moore: No trophies but of Love

Paul Morand: The magic disappearance of ten millions of war dead

Paul Morand: Nations never lay down their arms; death which is still combative

Paul Morand: The War for Righteousness ends in the burying of moral sense

Paul Morand: You did not believe in the war

Marcel Moreau: Children playing at war, the actual weapon of a crime

Alberto Moravia: Selections on war

Alberto Moravia: “Ah well, war is war, you know”

Alberto Moravia: Even in uniform and with a chest covered with medals, always a thief and a murderer

Alberto Moravia: That is what war is like, the war is everywhere

Alberto Moravia: Torn colored posters inciting people to war

Alberto Moravia: War destroys all things seen and unseen

Alberto Moravia: War survives in our souls long after it is over

Hannah More: War

Thomas More: Battles result from lust for fame and glory

Angela Morgan: Selections on war and peace

Angela Morgan: Beauty thy call must wait (while world is furrowed by graves of precious youth who died in vain)

Angela Morgan: For the moment’s red renown. Battle Cry of the Mothers.

Angela Morgan: God prays for peace

Angela Morgan: In Spite of War

Angela Morgan: Mothers “Go, fashion the Future’s laws that war shall be no more”

Angela Morgan: The Summons

Angela Morgan: Tell us the battlefields have lied, that men are still immaculate

Angela Morgan: War! Shall you be our lover? War! Shall you be our mate?

Angela Morgan: Whether to yield in meekness to War’s devouring curse

Charles Morice: Woe to you enemies of peace

Christopher Morley: Humanity’s most beautiful gift, Peace

Christopher Morley: No enthusiasm for hymns of hate

Jean Lewis Morris: A Patriot I!

Lewis Morris: Selections on war and peace

Lewis Morris: The blight of war surges in waves of blood

Lewis Morris: The evil blight of war torments the race from age to age

Lewis Morris: Filled with love of peace

Lewis Morris: Put off the curse of war

Lewis Morris: Red war, the dungeon, and the stake

Lewis Morris: When the cannons roar and the trumpets blare no longer

Lewis Morris: White-winged Peace triumphs over War’s red rapine

Lewis Morris: Who will free us from the dreadful past of war and hatred?

Lewis Morris: The world rang with the fierce shouts of war and cries of pain

William Morris: No man knew the sight of blood

William Morris: Protecting the strong from the weak, selling each other weapons to kill their own countrymen

William Morris: The role of soldiers and how they will disappear

William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home

Mozi: War, Right or Wrong

Philip Stafford Moxom: The Palace of Peace

Sergei Mstislavsky: Germ warfare of the future

Luise Mühlbach: Battle-field writes names of its heroes in blood

Iris Murdoch: The soldiers should all just throw down their arms

Iris Murdoch: You don’t have to kill people fighting for social justice

John Middleton Murry: Selections on peace and war

John Middleton Murry: The choice, democracy or modern warfare

John Middleton Murry: For England, peace or destruction

John Middleton Murry: The machine of war

John Middleton Murry: Modern warfare is the deliberate massacre of the innocents

John Middleton Murry: The morality of bombing civilians is not arithmetic

John Middleton Murry: Non-intervention versus the universal peace of universal destruction

John Middleton Murry: The pacifism of luxury and the pacifism of sacrifice

John Middleton Murry: Pacifist movement to bear witness against total dehumanization of humanity necessitated by modern war

John Middleton Murry: Weapons of modern war involve bestialization of humanity

Benjamin Musser: Paradox

Alfred de Musset: “No, none of these things, but simply peace.”

Lilika Nakos: Selections on war

Lilika Nakos: The dead man, the living, the house; all were smashed to bits

Lilika Nakos: Do I know what makes men kill each other?

Lilika Nakos: Do you think the war will ever end?

Lilika Nakos: The grandmother’s sin

Lilika Nakos: “Surely God didn’t intend this butchery”

Lilika Nakos: “What’s the war got to do with God?”

Thomas Nashe: Swords may not fight with fate

Nikolai Nekrasov: In War

Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise

Alfred Neumann: Selections on war

Alfred Neumann: Debunking the glory of twenty murderous years, the greatest mass-murderer in history

Alfred Neumann: Empire destroys peace, converts liberalism into harvest of blood

Alfred Neumann: European hegemony emerges from piled-up corpses, out of recent graves

Alfred Neumann: Four thousand miles of fratricidal murder

Alfred Neumann: Modern war, the murderous happiness of the greatest number

Alfred Neumann: The morals and manners of the War God

Alfred Neumann: Sacred recalcitrance toward the black hatred of war

Alfred Neumann: Scandalous was the idea of winning happiness through war, of making profit out of war

Alfred Neumann: The stench of burning flesh. That happens sometimes.

Alfred Neumann: Ten million lives for one man’s glory; the emperor changes his hat

Alfred Neumann: This is how it happens in history. Soldiers become thieves, thieves become murderers.

Alfred Neumann: Twilight of a conqueror

Alfred Neumann: The ultima ratio of all dictatorships: war

Alfred Neumann: War and the stock market

Alfred Neumann: War, the Great Incendiary, the everlasting prototype of annihilation

Alfred Neumann: War is not ambiguous after all, but a horribly intelligent affair

Alfred Neumann: The War Minister

Alfred Neumann: War nights were never silent

Alfred Neumann: War: Sad, hate-filled, hopeless and God-forsaken

Alfred Neumann: War’s arena, a monstrous distortion, a blasphemous coupling of life and death

Martin Andersen Nexø : From warlike giant to hysterical popinjay

Pierre Nicole: Peacemakers warrant highest title men are capable of

Pierre Nicole: Scripture obliges us to seek and desire the peace of the whole world

Adela Florence Nicolson: Doubtless feasted the jackal and the kite

Roger Nimier: Selections on war

Roger Nimier: I saw war in its stark reality

Roger Nimier: Sacrificial lambs whose howls could be heard from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caspian Sea

Roger Nimier: Soldiers are like that

Roger Nimier: Thankful for divine justice: a horrible wound rewarded me for all the harm I had done

Roger Nimier: Those who fall in love with war will surely die in her arms

Paul Nizan: War completely assembled, like a mighty engine

Nobel prize in literature recipients on peace and war

Charles Nodier: Fruitless is the glory of battles

Charles Nodier: Painful to the eyes and the heart of he who cherishes liberty

Nonnos: Brother-murdering blade. Disarming the god of war.

Charles Eliot Norton: Fighting the devil with his own arms: Declaration of war does not change the moral law

Grace Fallow Norton: O I have heard the drums beat for war!

Evgeny Nosov: What a single shell destroys

Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace

Alfred Noyes: Selections on war

Alfred Noyes: And the cost of war, they reckoned it In little disks of gold

Alfred Noyes: The Dawn of Peace

Alfred Noyes: Mars and Urania

Alfred Noyes: Medicine driven back in defeat by the nightmare chaos of war

Alfred Noyes: The men he must kill for a little pay. And once he had sickened to watch them slaughter an ox.

Alfred Noyes: Out of the obscene seas of slaughter

Alfred Noyes: Scarecrows that once were men

Alfred Noyes: A shuddering lump of tattered wounds lifted up a mangled head and whined

Alfred Noyes: Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!

Alfred Noyes: They say that war’s a noble thing!

Alfred Noyes: Turning wasteful strength of war to accomplish large and fruitful tasks of peace

Alfred Noyes: The Victory Ball

Alfred Noyes: War, hypocritical word for universal murder

Alfred Noyes: War they tell me is a noble thing

Alfred Noyes: When they talked of war, they thought of sawdust, not of blood

Alfred Noyes: The Wine Press

Sara Louisa Oberholtzer: The dawn of peace is breaking!

Sean O’Casey: Battles of war changed for battles of peace

Sean O’Casey: The dead of wars past clasp their colder arms around the newer dead

Sean O’Casey: The Prince of Peace transformed into the god of war

Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one

Kenzaburō Ōe: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever

Kenzaburo Ōe: Nuclear war and its lemmings

Liam O’Flaherty: The foul horror of war

Liam O’Flaherty: Sounds from a dead world. Nothing but worms and rats feeding on death.

Georges Ohnet: Pillaging in the wake of victorious armies

Zoé Oldenbourg: War provides a feast for the vultures

John Oldham: The cup and the sword

Eugene O’Neill: The hell that follows war

E. Philips Oppenheim: Black tragedy leaned over the land

Amelia Opie: Grant, Heaven, those tears may be the last that war, detested war, shall cause!

Origen: Vanquish all demons who stir up war

Charles d’Orléans: Pray for Peace

Julio Ortega: The fall of the great warrior empires

Frances Sargent Osgood: Peace and the olive branch

Ovid: Selections on war and peace

Ovid: Add incense, ye priests, to the flames that burn on the altar of Peace

Ovid: Golden Age, before weapons were warm and bloodstained from killing

Ovid: I had naught to do with war, guardian was I of peace and doorways

Ovid: Instead of a wolf the timorous ewes dread war

Ovid: Pray for perpetual peace and a peace-loving leader

Ovid: Sabine peace

Wildred Owen: Selections on war

Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled

Wilfred Owen: For torture of lying machinally shelled at the pleasure of this world’s Powers who’d run amok

Wilfred Owen: From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept

Wilfred Owen: Multitudinous murders they once witnessed

Wilfred Owen: 1914

Wilfred Owen: The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

Wilfred Owen: Pawing us who dealt them war and madness

Wildred Owen: Rushed in the body to enter hell and there out-fiending all its fiends and flames

Wilfred Owen: Soldier’s Dream

Wilfred Owen: The sons we offered might regret they died if we got nothing lasting in their stead

Wildred Owen: Strange meeting: I am the enemy you killed, my friend

John Oxenham: The Stars’ Accusal

John Oxenham: Thank God For Peace!

Thomas Parnell: Lovely, lasting peace, appear!

Blaise Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another

Blaise Pascal: Observations on the causes of war

Blaise Pascal: Why kings go to war

Walter Pater: What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Deity of Slaughter.

Coventry Patmore: Peace in life and art

Pausanias: Peace cradling Wealth in her arms

Pausanias: Woe to man

Konstantin Paustovsky: All conquerors are mad

Konstantin Paustovsky: Cervantes slain in war

Cesare Pavese: Every war is a civil war

Cesare Pavese: A moment of peace, to be reborn into a bloodless world

Josephine Preston Peabody: Harvest Moon

Thomas Love Peacock: Selections on war and peace

Thomas Love Peacock: Frenzied war’s ensanguined reign

Thomas Love Peacock: The god of battle, the last deep groan of agony

Thomas Love Peacock: I’ll make my verses rattle with the din of war and battle

Thomas Love Peacock: Ne’er thy sweet echoes swell again with war’s demoniac yell!

Thomas Love Peacock: We spilt blood enough to swim in, we orphaned many children and widowed many women

Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God

Benjamin Péret: Little song for the maimed

Benito Pérez Galdós: Cannon should be cast into church bells

Benito Pérez Galdós: Good God! why are there wars?

Petrarch: Return, O heaven-born Peace!

Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace

Lori Petri: Battleships

Petronius : Dreams of war

David Graham Phillips: Captains of industry, industrial warfare, marauders and renegade generals

David Graham Phillips: Hate war and fightin’ and money grabbin’

Stephen Phillips: Appalled at bloody trophies

Philo: “Ah, my friends, how should you not hate war and love peace?”

Philo: Casting off the warlike spirit in its completeness

Philo: “Nourished” for war and all its attendant evils

Philostratus: War versus love

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Holy peace wherein men become angels

Mariano Picón-Salas: From dream of warlike soldiers to nightmare of flames and ashes

John Pierpont: Not on the Battle-Field

Pindar: The arts versus war

Pindar: Shall war spread unbounded ruin round?

Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics

Plato: Selections on war

Plato: All wars arise for the sake of gaining money

Plato: A good city has peace, but the evil city is full of wars within and without

Plato: The highest good is not war but peace

Plato: No true statesman looks only, or first of all, to external warfare

Plato: Socrates on the eulogizing of war heroes

Plato: They both hate and are hated. Silver and gold and war.

Plato: The tyrant is always stirring up war, the oligarchy uses force of arms to gain power

Andrei Platonov: Will the world become inured to bombing?

Plautus: Military braggadocio

Pliny the Elder: Crime and slaughter and warfare. Humanity’s war against its mother

Pliny the Elder: Curious disease of the sublunary, sanguinary human mind

Plotinus: Let earth be at peace and sea, air and the very heavens

Max Plowman: The dead soldiers. Killing men is always killing God.

Max Plowman: The God of War

Max Plowman: The Goddess of War

Max Plowman: Resignation from war, enlistment in life. Killing men is always killing God.

Joseph Mary Plunkett: Till blooms the bud on olive branch, borne by the bird of peace

Plutarch: Selections on war and peace

Plutarch: Advanced and bettered by wars? Only if riches, luxury, dominion are preferred to security, gentleness, independence accompanied by justice.

Plutarch: Entire and universal cessation of war

Plutarch: Lover of peace changed the first month of the year

Plutarch: Motivations and consequences of war

Plutarch: Numa’s guardians of peace

Plutarch: On war and its opponents

Plutarch: The privilege of being wounded and killed in war for the defense of their creditors

Plutarch: Sharpened and whetted to war from their very infancy. So unsocial and wild-beast-like is the nature of ambition and cupidity.

Plutarch: They fought indeed and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of other men

Plutarch: Venus, who more than the rest of the gods and goddesses abhors force and war

Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest

Polybius: The bestialization of man by war

Polybius: Diplomacy versus war

Polybius: Peace is a blessing for which we all pray to the gods

Ernest Poole: Apply for death certificates here. War’s house of death.

Ernest Poole: The hatred rising in all men has already butchered millions and will butcher millions more!

Ernest Poole: War cuts off the past from the future

Ernest Poole: War was the fashion. War was a pageant, a thing of romance.

Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend

Alexander Pope: War, horrid war, your thoughtful walks invades

Alexander Pope: Where Peace scatters blessings from her dovelike wing

Jessie Pope: Black, solemn peace is brooding low; peace, still unbroken

John Cowper Powys: To Eugene Debs, in prison for opposing war

Vladimir Pozner: Mars and Ceres

Winthrop Mackworth Praed: Take the sword away

George Preedy: One gigantic symbol of war, a cloudy impersonal cohort of Mars

J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery

Thomas Pringle: After the slaughter, the feast

Thomas Pringle: Resistless swept the ranks of war, the murder-glutted scythe of death

Matthew Prior: A new golden age free from fierce Bellona’s rage

Procopius: A parable

Procopius: Refuge from war

Adelaide A. Procter: Let carnage cease and give us peace!

Propertius: Elegy on war

Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew

Prudentius: Cruel warfare angers God

Publilius Syrus: Better plow than weapon

Samuel von Pufendorf: Perverted animals wage wars for superfluities

Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war

Francisco de Quevedo: Metal against metal: Learning causes peace to be sought after

Francisco de Quevedo: The soldierly virtues of ardor, candor, honor and valor

Arthur Quiller-Couch: Man shall outlast his battles

Edgar Quinet: The soul of man has vanished, nations and races are doomed to combat and destroy each other

Quintilian: War, the antithesis of justice

Quintus Smyrnaeus: In his talons bore a gasping dove. Where never ceased Ares from hideous slaughter.

Quintus Smyrnaeus: Mass murder’s tropes: Dread Ares drank his fill of blood

Quintus Smyrnaeus: While here all war’s marvels were portrayed, there were the works of lovely peace

François Rabelais: Born for peace, not war

François Rabelais: The magnanimity of peace

François Rabelais: Strictures against war

François Rabelais: Waging war in good earnest

C.F. Ramuz: Little by little the war spreads

Beatrice Witte Ravenel: Missing. How many women in how many lands wait beside the desolate hearthstone!

Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties

Herbert Read: The Happy Warrior

Charles Reade: To God? Rather to war and his sister and to the god of lies

Charles Reade: War is sweet to those who have never experienced it

Thomas Reid: State of nature versus state of war

Frank C. Reighter: Victim of War’s murd’rous tyranny

Erich Maria Remarque: Selections on war

Erich Maria Remarque: After the war: The day of great dreams for the future of mankind was past

Erich Maria Remarque: All learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery so long as mankind makes war

Erich Maria Remarque: The front begins and we become on the instant human animals

Erich Maria Remarque: It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation

Erich Maria Remarque: Like a dove, a lonely white dove of assurance and peace

Erich Maria Remarque: Now, for the first time, I feel it; I see it; I comprehend it fully: Peace.

Erich Maria Remarque: On every yard there lies a dead man

Erich Maria Remarque: Peace?

Erich Maria Remarque: Their fighting and their dying have been coupled with murder and injustice and lies and might; they have been defrauded

Erich Maria Remarque: War dreams

Erich Maria Remarque: The war has ruined us for everything

Erich Maria Remarque: War, mass production of corpses

Erich Maria Remarque: War turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils

Erich Maria Remarque: A war veteran’s indictment

Erich Maria Remarque: War was everywhere. Everywhere, even in the brain and the heart.

Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms

Erich Maria Remarque: We want to be men again, not war machines!

Erich Maria Remarque: We were making war against ourselves without knowing it

Erich Maria Remarque: What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over?

Erich Maria Remarque: With the melting came the dead

Erich Maria Remarque: Worse than a slaughterhouse

Ernest Renan: No military path to the kingdom of God

Jules Renard: Almost succeed in making you accept the butcheries of war

Jean Renoir: War’s solemn human sacrifice

Ernest Rhys: Enough of war, enough of death

Elmer Rice: The expediency of choosing the right side in a war

Charles Richardson: The Dawn of Peace

Charlotte Richardson: Once more let war and discord cease

Clément Richer: The impatience of dead generals

Jean Paul Richter: The arch of peace

Jean Paul Richter: The fathers of war

Jean Paul Richter: The Goddess of Peace

James Whitcomb Riley: Sang! sang on! sang hate – sang war –

Rainer Maria Rilke: War is always a prison

Arthur Rimbaud: Evil

Yannis Ritsos: Peace

Edwin Arlington Robinson: Though your very flesh and blood the Eagle eats and drinks, you’ll praise him for the best of birds

Marilynne Robinson: The sign was ignored and since then we have had war continuously

Mary Robinson: Selections on war

Mary Robinson: Anticipate the day when ruthless war shall cease to desolate

Mary Robinson: Dread-destructive power of war

Mary Robinson: Impetuous War, the lord of slaughter

Mary Robinson: The soldier sheds, for gold, a brother’s blood

Mary Robinson: Spread once more the fostering rays of Peace

Mary Robinson: The wise shall bid, too late, the sacred olive rise

Emmanuel Roblès: Respect is first due to the living

Emmanuel Roblès: The war has changed my soul

Samuel Rogers: War and the Great in War let others sing

Samuel Rogers: What tho’ the iron school of War erase each milder virtue…

Romain Rolland: Selections on war

Romain Rolland: A father’s plea against war

Romain Rolland: The abominable war crimes of intellectuals

Romain Rolland: Above The Battle

Romain Rolland: Against grasping imperialism and inhuman pride, military caste and megalomania of pedants

Romain Rolland: America and the war against war

Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant

Romain Rolland: Centuries to recreate what war destroys in a day

Romain Rolland: Chorus of war’s secular high priests and intellectual carpet knights

Romain Rolland: Civilized warfare allows victims choice of how to be slaughtered

Romain Rolland: The collective insanity, the terrible spirit of war

Romain Rolland: Content with having said “No!” to war

Romain Rolland: The enormous iniquity, the ignoble calculations of war

Romain Rolland: The equivocating sages of Armed Peace

Romain Rolland: Gandhi and the Satanic nature of war

Romain Rolland: Gandhi vs Einstein: War must be stopped before it starts

Romain Rolland: Goddess of prey, Anti-Christ, hovering over butcheries with spread wings and hawk’s talons

Romain Rolland: Hatred and holy butchery; the deadly sophistry, carnivorous poetry of war

Romain Rolland: He loathed brutal militarism

Romain Rolland: The heroism of war resisters

Romain Rolland: The intellectual drunkeness of war propaganda

Romain Rolland on Leo Tolstoy: How is it they are able to retain the lust of destroying their fellows?

Romain Rolland on Henri Barbusse: The isolated bleating of one of the beasts about to die

Romain Rolland: Letter to Gandhi on confronting age of global wars

Romain Rolland: Letter to Gandhi on total inadmissibility of war

Romain Rolland: Letters on conscientious objection

Rolland Rolland: Letters to Tagore on peace

Romain Rolland: The life that would have been, the life that was not going to be

Romain Rolland: A little idealism to make the war booty more delectable

Romain Rolland: Message to America on the will to conquer the world

Romain Rolland: Mobilization of all the forces in the world for peace

Romain Rolland: Not enough that nations are destroyed, they are bidden to glorify Death, to march towards it with songs

Romain Rolland: Oh, fair diplomats, you rid us of irksome peace

Romain Rolland: Our Neighbor the Enemy

Romain Rolland: Pacifism only allowed when it is not effective

Romain Rolland: Peace and war are in the hands of those who hold the purse-strings

Romain Rolland: Real peace demands that the masters of war be eliminated

Romain Rolland: Reawakening of old instincts of national pride, lapping of blood

Romain Rolland: Recurrence of the hell of war

Romain Rolland: To Gandhi on mental unbalance leading whole world to destruction

Romain Rolland: To the Murdered Peoples

Romain Rolland: To the undying Antigone; waging war against war

Romain Rolland: Tolstoy and peace among men

Romain Rolland: Totalizing, to their personal profit, the ruin of all nations

Romain Rolland: Tragedy of scientists at the disposal of military powers

Romain Rolland: War, a divine monster; half-beast, half-god

Romain Rolland: War, a pathological fact, a plague of the soul

Romain Rolland: War and the factories of intellectual munitions and cannon

Romain Rolland: War enriches a few, and ruins the community

Romain Rolland: The way to peace is not through weakness

Romain Rolland: When we defend war, dare to admit we are defending slavery

Romain Rolland: Where to rebuild the world after war?

Romain Rolland: Youth delivered up to the sword of war

Jules Romains: Selections on war

Jules Romains: Colloquy on God and war

Jules Romains: Communion of saints opposing war’s mutual massacre, human sacrifice

Jules Romains: Condign punishment for war profiteers and professional patriots

Jules Romains: Dawning of new century shot with sinister streaks of war

Jules Romains: Deadening effects of war on human sensibilities, defeat of civilization by barbarism

Jules Romains: Destruction of war itself, its deletion from the pages of history

Jules Romains: Distinguishing characteristic of modern warfare is that it will never come to an end of itself

Jules Romains: Even the very word was new: war

Jules Romains: Fraternization versus fratricide, the forbidden subject of peace

Jules Romains: If mankind could put two and two together, there’d be no more war

Jules Romains: Just kill because the more dead there are, the fewer living will remain

Jules Romains: Living under the curse of war since childhood

Jules Romains: Romantic view of war played a dirty trick on the warriors

Jules Romains: Squalidly degrading everything that the civilization of mankind had created

Jules Romains: Unnatural war will only stop when everybody, on both sides, is killed

Jules Romains: War means a golden age for the munitions makers

Jules Romains: War: symphony of death, vast pudding concocted of corpses

Jules Romains: War turns murder into a public and highly praiseworthy action

Jules Romains: War under modern conditions has need of everything that man produces

Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars

E. Merrill Root: Drill, like sheep with wolves’ fangs, meek to kill

E. Merrill Root: Military drill. Murder’s witless marionettes.

Isaac Rosenberg: Poems on war

Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches

Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump

Isaac Rosenberg: In War

Isaac Rosenberg: O! ancient crimson curse! On receiving news of the war

Isaac Rosenberg: Soldier: Twentieth Century

Christina Rossetti: They reap a red crop from the field. O Man, put up thy sword.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet?

Joseph Roth: Black and red, death fluttered over them

Joseph Roth: His son was dead. His world had ended.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on peace and war

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The advantages of peace

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: No nobler, more beautiful scheme than lasting peace

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: No such thing as a successful war

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The scheme of founding a lasting peace is the most lofty ever conceived

Rousseau: The State of War

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: War and despotism reinforce each other

Claude Roy: Great wars and those which kill just as effectively

Gabrielle Roy: This was the hope that was uplifting mankind once again: to do away with war

Jules Roy: Any attempt to escape the universal holocaust would mean being hunted and tortured wherever he went

Rick Rozoff: Mars, only Olympian whose veins flow not with ichor

Rick Rozoff: A Protest

John Ruskin: Peace Song

George William Russell: Gods of War

Russian writers on peace and war

Rutilius Namatianus: Races of demigods who knew not iron-harnessed Mars

Edwin L. Sabin: Where Will the War be Next?

Margaret Sackville: Selections on peace and war

Margaret Sackville: How is it that men slaughter men even here upon the earth?

Margaret Sackville: Nostra Culpa

Margaret Sackville: The Pageant of War

Margaret Sackville: The Peacemakers

Margaret Sackville: Quo Vaditis?

Margaret Sackville: Reconciliation over our mutual dead

Margaret Sackville: Sacrament

Margaret Sackville: So quietly and evenly they walked these million gentle dead

Margaret Sackville: To One Who Denies the Possibility of a Permanent Peace

Margaret Sackville: We are the mothers, and each has lost a son

Margaret Sackville: Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?

Vita Sackville-West: Man’s war on his fellow creatures

Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: War has tricked us

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: Théophile Gautier, lover of peace

George Saintsbury: The odious profession

Miguel de Salabert: I first learned about men from their bombs

Miguel de Salabert: “What have you done with my legs?”

Miguel de Salabert: When they gave me a rifle to carry, I knew my life was over

Sallust: Lust for dominion the reason for war

Sallust: One may become famous in peace as well as in war

Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise

Francis Saltus Saltus: Selections on peace and war

Francis Saltus Saltus: Deem you one ambitious whose subjects bleed and perish on a field?

Francis Saltus Saltus: If we saw but a century of peace

Francis Saltus Saltus: Peace to see our Love and Law arrived to witness cruel War

Francis Saltus Saltus: Thy theme was one of utter peace

Francis Saltus Saltus: The wind favors poets over conquerors

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: The grandeur, the selflessness of war

George Sand: Trader in uniformed flesh and the religion of self

Carl Sandburg: Selections on war

Carl Sandburg: And They Obey

Carl Sandburg: The grass grows over Austerlitz and Waterloo

Carl Sandburg: Ready to Kill

Carl Sandburg: Statistics

Carl Sandburg: Wars

Carl Sandburg: What it costs to move two buttons one inch on the war map

George Santayana: Selections on war

George Santayana on war and militarism

George Santayana: Fatal wars: equally needless, equally murderous

George Santayana: If dreadful outer world became troublesome, it would be necessary to make war on it and teach it a lesson

George Santayana: Only the dead have seen the end of war

George Santayana: Such blind battles ought not to be our battles

George Santayana: We want peace and make war

Mary McDermott Santley: The serene light of peace to all mankind

Sergei Sartakov: I fervently wish for universal peace

Sergei Sartakov: No to eternal war

Jean-Paul Sartre: They lift their heads and look up at the sky, the poisonous sky

Jean-Paul Sartre: When staging a massacre, all soldiers look alike

Jean-Paul Sartre: When the rich fight the rich, it is the poor who die

Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war

Siegfried Sassoon: Aftermath

Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man

Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph

Siegfried Sassoon: Atrocities

Siegfried Sassoon: Enemies

Siegfried Sassoon: The foul beast of war that bludgeons life

Siegfried Sassoon: Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace

Siegfried Sassoon: No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace

Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded

Siegfried Sassoon: Repression of War Experience

Siegfried Sassoon: Their dreams that drip with murder, of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride

Siegfried Sassoon: To Any Dead Officer

Siegfried Sassoon: The Tombstone-Maker

Siegfried Sassoon: The unheroic dead who fed the guns, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones

Siegfried Sassoon: War, remorse and reconciliation

Siegfried Sassoon: We left our holes and looked above the wreckage of the earth

Scandinavian writers on peace and war

Ethel Talbot Scheffauer: The sun shall rise upon a newer world that has forgot to kill

Joseph Victor von Scheffel: The Muses heal what Mars has wrought

Joseph Victor von Scheffel: The wood of peace

Friedrich Schiller: Beauty, peace and reconciliation

Friedrich Schiller: The citizen is naught, the soldier all; rude hordes, lawless grown in lengthy war

Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn

August Wilhelm Schlegel: Aristophanes, tragedian of peace

Arthur Schnitzler: Cannot praise war in general and oppose individual wars

Arthur Schnitzler: Political reaction is the consequence of victorious wars; revolution the consequence of lost ones

Arthur Schnitzler: Remold the structure of government so that war becomes impossible

Arthur Schnitzler: War, making fathers pay wages to their sons whom we sent to their deaths

Lawrence Schoonover: Accursed powder

Lawrence Schoonover: An age of strict justice and peace, when nations shall live under law, without war

Lawrence Schoonover: An entire nation praying for peace at one time

Arthur Schopenhauer: Beasts of prey in the human race

Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!

Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war

Olive Schreiner: I have never met a human creature who hates war as I hate it

Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands

Clinton Scollard: Selections on war and peace

Clinton Scollard: Can mankind win to heights of peace and perfect amity?

Clinton Scollard: The Carnival of war

Clinton Scollard: Mars’ mad and holocaustal rite

Clinton Scollard: The Night Sowers

Clinton Scollard: Prayer: bid this reign of hate and horror end!

Clinton Scollard: Sunset Trees

Clinton Scollard: The Vale of Shadows

Clinton Scollard: Victories

Clinton Scollard: The Watcher by the Tower

Clinton Scollard: The Winds of God

John Scott: I hate that drum’s discordant sound

Walter Scott: The diffusion of knowledge, not the effusion of blood

Walter Scott: Fighting

Walter Scott: War’s cannibal priest, druid red from his human sacrifice

Walter Scott: The worst sort of frenzy, military frenzy, hath possessed man, woman and child

Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead

Étienne Pivert de Senancour: War, state-sanctioned suicide

Seneca the Elder: It is this that drives the world into war

Seneca the Elder: What is this hideous disease, this appalling evil that drove you to shed each other’s blood?

Seneca on war: Deeds punished by death when committed by individuals praised when carried out by generals

Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion

Alexander Serafimovich: Down with war!

Anna Seward: Fierce War has wing’d the arrow that wounds my soul’s repose

Shaftesbury: Improvement of arts and scholarship requires rest from war

William Shakespeare: Selections on war and peace

William Shakespeare: Blessed is the peacemaker

William Shakespeare: Contumelious, beastly, mad-brained war

William Shakespeare: Death of twenty thousand men for fantasy and fame

William Shakespeare: Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace

William Shakespeare: Naked, poor, mangled peace, dear nurse of arts, plenties, joyful births

William Shakespeare: Never a war did cease…with such a peace

William Shakespeare: Nor more shall trenching war channel her fields, bruise her flowerets

William Shakespeare: O bloody times. When lions war, sons kill fathers, fathers sons

William Shakespeare: O war, thou son of hell

Shakespeare: On driving a husband to none-sparing war

William Shakespeare: Out of speech of peace into harsh tongue of war

Shakespeare: So inured to war that mothers smile as their children are slain

William Shakespeare: Soldier, a creature that I teach to fight

William Shakespeare: Take heed how you awake our sleeping sword of war

William Shakespeare: Tame the savage spirit of wild war

William Shakespeare: War’s exactions

William Shakespeare: Works of poetry outlast the works of war

Ivan Shamyakin: As a physicist, she feared for the fate of mankind

George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war

George Bernard Shaw: The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors

George Bernard Shaw: Gadarene swine running violently into a hell of high explosives

George Bernard Shaw: Little Minds and Big Battles

George Bernard Shaw: The Long Arm of War

Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War

George Bernard Shaw: Rabid war maniacs reversed the order of nature

George Bernard Shaw: Religion as antidote to war

George Bernard Shaw: Religion of ruthless competition inevitably leads to war

George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction

George Bernard Shaw: Soldiering is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak

George Bernard Shaw: War and frivolous exultation in death for its own sake

George Bernard Shaw: War and the sufferings of the sane

George Bernard Shaw: War Delirium

George Bernard Shaw: War, governments and munitions manufacturers

George Bernard Shaw: War, the Yahoo and the angry ape

George Bernard Shaw: The way of the soldier is the way of death

Mary Shelley: On peace and war

Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man

Mary Shelley: I do not sympathize in their dreams of massacre and glory

Mary Shelley: I turned to the corpse-strewn earth and felt ashamed of my species

Mary Shelley: If my first introduction to humanity had been a young soldier, burning for glory and slaughter

Mary Shelley: Men have slain each other by thousands, now man is a creature of price

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selections on war

Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Earth cleansed of quivers, spears and gorgon-headed shields

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The fatal trump of useless war to swell

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Man fabricates the sword which stabs his peace

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Peace, love and concord once shall rule again

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Titled idiot kindles flames of war

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The unholy song of war

Percy Bysshe Shelley: War and the decline of poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley: War with its million horrors shall live but in the memory of time

William Shenstone: Ah, hapless realms! that war’s oppression feel.

William Shenstone: Let the gull’d fool the toils of war pursue

William Shenstone: War, where bleed the many to enrich the few

Kate Brownlee Sherwood: This one soft whisper – Peace

Robert Sherwood: War is essentially a false, hideous mistake

Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission…at sword’s point

James Shirley: Some men with swords may reap the field and plant fresh laurels where they kill

Mikhail Sholokhov: Selections on war

Mikhail Sholokhov: His entire face a cry, screaming without opening his lips

Mikhail Sholokhov: People worse than wolves. And it was called a heroic exploit.

Mikhail Sholokhov: Visit to a military hospital

Mikhail Sholokhov: War’s bitter harvest

Mikhail Sholokhov: Who was he calling for in his hour of death?

Mikhail Sholokhov: With innumerable hands the soldiers reached out to the phantasmal word “peace”

Vasily Shukshin: How many lives destroyed

Lydia Sigourney: Peace was the song the angels sang

Silius Italicus: Peace is the best thing that man may know; peace alone is better than a thousand triumphs

Louise Morgan Sill: I am the Hell-god, War!

Ignazio Silone: Resorting to the bloody diversion of war

Ignazio Silone: They have been warned of wars and rumors of wars

Ignazio Silone: War with today’s hereditary enemy

Victor Domingo Silva: Cain, the fratricide

Simonides: Dirges for the victims of the impetuous War-God

Upton Sinclair: Selections on war

Upton Sinclair: After war, the color revolution cleanup

Upton Sinclair: A banker’s post-war nightmare

Upton Sinclair: Decade of national cynicism, corruption followed “war for democracy”

Upton Sinclair: Gigantic stir of war preparation for global territorial aggrandizement

Upton Sinclair: How wars start, how they can be prevented

Upton Sinclair: The Juggernaut of war flattens out all opposition

Upton Sinclair: The lost people are those who go to be shot, killed in big war (Dante through Vanzetti)

Upton Sinclair: The plea of Nicola Sacco, “What is war?”

Upton Sinclair: New Lysistratas: Women must refuse to have babies until men stop killing

Upton Sinclair: Spending several times as much money to prepare for an even greater war to end war

Upton Sinclair: U.S. invasion of Russia: nothing but wholesale murder; American army and navy as a world police-force

Upton Sinclair: Using all the machinery and brains of civilization to slaughter one another

Upton Sinclair: The war system, bankers recouping the costs of war propaganda

Upton Sinclair: War’s one-sided boost to the economy

Upton Sinclair: What it costs a woman to keep the world at war

Upton Sinclair: World war as a business enterprise

Ina Duvall Singleton: The Women’s Litany

Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise

Osbert Sitwell: Totally out of place in a war-mad world

Osbert Sitwell: Wilfred Owen, poetry and war

Christopher Smart: Rejoice with the dove. Pray that all guns be nailed up.

M. B. Smedley: Where is the ministry of peace?

Charlotte Turner Smith: The lawless soldiers’ victims

Charlotte Turner Smith: Statesmen! ne’er dreading a scar, let loose the demons of war

Charlotte Turner Smith: Thus man spoils Heaven’s glorious works with blood!

Charlotte Turner Smith: To bathe his savage hands in human blood

Horace Smith: Selections on peace and war

Horace Smith: The hero-butchers of the sword

Horace Smith: Manufactured to machines for killing human creatures

Horace Smith: The trade of man-butchery. The soldier and the sailor.

Horace Smith: Weapon gathering dust

Horace Smith: When War’s ensanguined banner shall be furl’d

Rembert G. Smith: O bid the wars of men to cease

Sydney Smith: War, hailing official murderers as the greatest and most glorious of human creatures

Thorne Smith: Make statues of war’s wholesale butchers before they strike

Tobias Smollett: War contractors fattened on the blood of the nation

Tobias Smollett: The war glories of a demagogue

C.P. Snow: Selections on war

C.P. Snow: As final product of scientific civilization, nuclear bomb is its ultimate indictment

C.P. Snow: Even if moral judgments are left out, it’s unthinkable to drop the bomb

C.P. Snow: Hiroshima, the most horrible single act so far performed

C.P. Snow: Hope it’s never possible to develop superbomb

C. P. Snow: Their day is done

C.P. Snow: Worse than Genghiz Khan. Has there ever been a weapon that someone did not want to let off?

Vladimir Soloukhin: Shadow of this beautiful world being incinerated

Sophocles: War the destroyer

Charles Hamilton Sorley: The blind fight the blind

Charles Hamilton Sorley: When you see millions of the mouthless dead

Robert Southey: Selections on peace and war

Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim

Robert Southey: Preparing the way for peace; militarism versus Christianity

Robert Southey: The Soldier’s Wife

Robert Southey: Wade to glory through a sea of blood

Robert Southey: Year follows year, and still we madly prosecute the war

Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars

Wole Soyinka: Civilian and Soldier

Spanish writers on war and peace

Fanny Bixby Spencer: The shame of the cannonade

Fanny Bixby Spencer: Will your son kill mine or will mine kill yours?

Herbert Spencer: No patriotism when it comes to wars of aggression

Stephen Spender: Selections on war

Stephen Spender: Automata controlled by the mechanism of war, meaningless struggle between potential ashes to gain a world of ashes

Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war

Stephen Spender: Two Armies

Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum

Stephen Spender: The War God

Stephen Spender: The Woolfs in the 1930s: War the inevitable result of an arms race.

Edmund Spenser: The first to attack the world with sword and fire

Edmund Spenser: Wars can nought but sorrows yield

Baruch Spinoza: Selections on war and peace

Baruch Spinoza: Fleeing peace for the despotic discipline of war

Baruch Spinoza: Men shouldn’t choose slavery in time of peace for better fortune in war

Baruch Spinoza: Peace is not mere absence of war

Baruch Spinoza: Tyrants and war for its own sake

Baruch Spinzoa: War corrupts civil society

Madame de Staël: Voting for war, pronouncing their own death sentence

Statius: Devilish monster’s tongue at last tells of war. “Whither, unhappy ones, whither are ye rushing to war, though fate and heaven would bar the way?”

Marguerite Steen: The sheer destructiveness of war made him angry

Marguerite Steen: The wreckage of the wars

Stendhal: Decorating it with the name of glory

Stendhal: Dreaming of the Marshall and his glory…

Stendhal: You’ve got to learn the business before you can become a soldier

Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay

George Sterling: To the War-Lords

George Sterling: War past, present, future

G. B. Stern: Conventions of war? War itself is the outrage.

Laurence Sterne: Follow Peace

Stesichorus: Thrust wars away

Robert Louis Stevenson: Peace we found where fire and war had been

Arthur E. Stilwell: The Day of Peace

Margaret Stineback: The Unknown Soldier

Frank Stockton: Battles of annihilation, the Anglo-American War Syndicate

Frank Stockton: The Great War Syndicate: “On to Canada!”

William Stokes: Selections on peace and war

William Stokes: The Angel of Peace

William Stokes: Can fields of blood redeem mankind from error?

William Stokes: Invocation to the Spirit of Peace

William Stokes: The peace of nations to destroy

William Stokes: The Soldier

Strabo: Ares, the only god they worship

Strabo: Studying war is wickedness

Lytton Strachey: After the battle, who shall say that the corpses were the most unfortunate?

August Strindberg: Progeny of soulless militarism

August Strindberg: What has become of the sacred promise of peace on our earth?

Hermann Sudermann: Militarism and its terminus

Hermann Sudermann: War irrigates the soil with blood, fertilizes it with corpses

Eugène Sue: War, murder by proxy

Suetonius: Caligula and military glory

Suetonius: Not let slip any pretext for war, however unjust and dangerous

Archil Sulakauri: I just can’t believe that people die so simply

Bertha von Suttner: Selections on peace and war

Bertha von Suttner: All Souls’ Day. Field of honor gives way to wasteland of broken hearts

Bertha von Suttner: Among these ills the most dreadful of all – War

Bertha von Suttner: Armaments, without fighting each other the nations would all come to ruin in making preparations for war

Bertha von Suttner: Education hardens children against natural horror which terrors of war awaken

Bertha von Suttner: Higher unity in which every war will appear impious fratricide

Bertha von Suttner: Mounting doubts about war

Bertha von Suttner: Outgrowing the old idolatry for war

Bertha von Suttner: The Protocol of Peace

Bertha von Suttner: Vengeance! War breeds more war.

Bertha von Suttner: War’s sophistry. At last the monster creeps out.

Jonathan Swift: Selections on war

Jonathan Swift: Brutes more modest than men in perpetuating war against their own species

Jonathan Swift: Few of this generation can remember anything but war and taxes

Jonathan Swift: How to select commanders, end wars

Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War

Jonathan Swift: We must have peace, let it be a bad or a good one

Algernon Charles Swinburne: Death made drunk with war

Algernon Charles Swinburne: A gospel of war and damnation for the bestial by birth

Algernon Charles Swinburne: There shall be no more wars nor kingdoms won

Frank Swinnerton: Aerial bombardment, the most stupid and futile aspect of war

John Addington Symonds: Nation with nation, land with land unarmed shall live as comrades free

Arthur Symons: A great reaction: people will be tired of wars

Tacitus: The robbery, slaughter and plunder that empire calls peace

Tacitus: When war bursts on us, innocent and guilty alike perish

Rabindranath Tagore: Secure disarmament, transform it into strength

Hippolyte Taine on the inhuman travesty of war

Anton Tammsaare: War, the greatest enterprise of the modern age

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: A day’s work, a night’s dream

Torquato Tasso: Pastoral refuge from war

Torquato Tasso: War’s devouring minister, the sword

Sara Teasdale: Dusk in War Time

Sara Teasdale: Spring in War-Time

Claude Tellier: At first sight you may think our enemies are men. You can tell them from human beings by the color of their uniforms.

Claude Tellier: The king who drags his people to those vast slaughter-houses known as battle-fields is a murderer.

Charles Tennant: Nor shall they learn war

William Tennant: Ode to Peace

William Tennant: While some sing of Mars’s bloody game…

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selections on war and peace

Alfred Lord Tennyson: The brazen bridge of war

Alfred Lord Tennyson: I would the old God of war himself were dead

Alfred Tennyson: Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace

Alfred Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

Alfred Lord Tennyson: When shall universal peace lie like light across the land?

Tertullian: As a last test of empire, make war on heaven

William Makepeace Thackeray: Selections on war

William Makepeace Thackeray: Millions of innocent hearts wounded horribly

William Makepeace Thackeray: “Pax in bello.” The death of a single soldier.

William Makepeace Thackeray: War taxes men and women alike

William Makepeace Thackeray: War’s slave dealers

William Makepeace Thackeray: What human crime, misery, slavery, go to form that sum-total of glory!

Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war

Theophrastus: Warmongering’s rumormongering

Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper

Edith Matilda Thomas: Air war: They are not humans.

Edith Matilda Thomas: The Altar of Moloch

Edith Matilda Thomas: The Flag

James Thomson: Despise the insensate barbarous trade of war

James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace

James Thomson: Philosophy’s plans of policy and peace

Mabel Thomson: A child’s ideal of soldiering

Francis Thompson: Flattering the too-much-pampered Boy of War

Francis Thompson: Kingly crown and warrior’s crest not worth a blade of grass

Henry David Thoreau: It is commonly said that history is a chronicle of war

Henry David Thoreau: Taxes enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood

Henry David Thoreau: War belies the claim that civilization is making rapid progress

Thucydides: Admonitions against war

Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons

Thomas Tickell: The Soldier’s late destroying Hand shall rear new Temples in his native Land

Christoph August Tiedge: Give to earth the light of peaceful day

Eunice Tietjens: Children of War

W. R. Titterton: The Silent People of No Man’s Land

Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods

Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies

Leo Tolstoy: Selections on war

Leo Tolstoy: As if there were any rules for killing people

Leo Tolstoy: The Beginning of the End

Leo Tolstoy: Christian cannot be a murderer and therefore cannot be a soldier

Leo Tolstoy: Dialogues on war

Leo Tolstoy: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”

Leo Tolstoy: He who kills most people receives the highest rewards

Leo Tolstoy: How is it that millions of men commit collective crimes – make war, commit murder, and so on?

Leo Tolstoy: Idealization of military malefactors is shameful

Leo Tolstoy: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence

Leo Tolstoy: Letter on the Peace Conference

Leo Tolstoy: Men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another

Leo Tolstoy: Murder and vengeance are not the will of the people

Leo Tolstoy: Patriotism or Peace

Leo Tolstoy: Prescription for peace

Leo Tolstoy: Then why those severed arms and legs and those dead men?

Leo Tolstoy: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”

Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est

Leo Tolstoy: War began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature

H. M. Tomlinson: Great offensive. Curse such trite and sounding words

H. M. Tomlinson: Greatest evil is unconscious indifference to war’s obscene blasphemy against life

H. M. Tomlinson: The return of the soldier, of he who was once alive

Edythe C. Toner: The Wraiths

Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing

Katrina Trask: Selections on war and peace

Katrina Trask: After the Battle

Katrina Trask: Civilized warfare

Katrina Trask: A dialogue on God and war

Katrina Trask: The Logic of War

Katrina Trask: The Statue of Peace

Katrina Trask: “Wars shall cease. Peace shall knit the world together in a bond of common Brotherhood.”

Lucia Trent: Breed, little mothers, breed for the war lords who slaughter your sons

Lucia Trent: Women of War

Yuri Trifonov: Our world – the world of peace!

Anthony Trollope: How wars are arranged

Anthony Trollope: Leader appointed to save the empire – with warships

Anthony Trollope: Sports, reading and war

Henri Troyat: Selections on war

Henri Troyat: All humanity passing through a crisis of destructive madness

Henri Troyat: I prefer to die, so that I no longer have to see the others die

Henri Troyat: Nothing grand, nothing noble, in the universal slaughter

Henri Troyat: Shedding blood for the motherland: War is ugly and absurd

Henri Troyat: So many men killed, so many towns burned…for a telegram

Henri Troyat: Thoughts stop with a shock: War!

Henri Troyat: Tolstoy’s visceral detestation of war

Henri Troyat: War, that greatest of political crimes

Henri Troyat: War, war, war! Oh, why?

Henri Troyat: “Will a day ever come when there’s no more war, no more lies, no more tragedy!”

Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots

Kurt Tucholsky: The Trench

Kurt Tucholsky: Murder in disguise

Ivan Turgenev: “Militarism, the soldiery, have got the upper hand”

Nancy Byrd Turner: Let Us Have Peace

Julia S. Tutwiler: O, the world has grown weary of battle and strife

Mark Twain: Selections on war

Mark Twain: The War Prayer

Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness

Mark Twain: The basest type of patriotism: support for war and imperialism

Mark Twain: The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date)

Mark Twain: Cain and mankind’s legacy of war

Mark Twain: Epitome of war, the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity

Mark Twain: Grotesque self-deception of war

Mark Twain: I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

Mark Twain: Maxims on battleships and statesmanship

Mark Twain: An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war

Mark Twain: Only dead men dare tell the whole truth about war

Mark Twain: Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War

Mark Twain on Western military threat to China: I am a Boxer

Mark Twain: Cecil Rhodes and the civilizing mission: He wants the earth and wants it for his own

Ukrainian writers on war

Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?

Louis Untermeyer: Daybreak after war

Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne

Armando Palacio Valdés: “He would be better with a pickaxe in his hand, and more useful to his country”

Juan Valera: Thou art the God of peace

Paul Valéry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission

Paul Valèry: War, science, art and Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace

César Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death

Jules Vallès: I hate war and its sinister glory

Henry van Dyke: Stain Not the Sky

Mario Vargas Llosa: More than enough atomic and conventional weapons to wipe out several planets

Varro: War’s etymologies

Henry Vaughan: Let us ‘midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss

Henry Vaughan: The Men of War

Henry Vaughan: What thunders shall those men arraign who cannot count those they have slain?

Vauvenargues: If we could discover the secret of banishing war forever

Vauvenargues: Soldiers

Thorstein Veblen: Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought

Velleius Paterculus: License of the sword inevitably leads to wars for profit

Roger Vercel: Boats built for men to live in, ships built to kill

Vercors: Are war crimes only committed by the vanquished?

Giovanni Verga: The Mother of Sorrows

Émile Verhaeren: I hold war in execration; ashamed to be butchers of their fellows

Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory

Giambattista Vico: Mars, the vilest of the gods

Gore Vidal: Navies, colonies, presidents, wars

Alfred de Vigny: Selections on war

Alfred de Vigny: Admiration for military commander turns us into slaves and madmen

Alfred de Vigny: The army is a machine wound up to kill

Alfred de Vigny: It is war that is wrong, not we

Alfred de Vigny: War is condemned of God and even of man who holds it in secret horror

Alfred de Vigny: When armies and war exist no more

Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: Vox Populi

Virgil: On war and on peace

Virgil: Age of peace

Virgil: The blind passion of unpitying war

Virgil: None heard the trumpet’s blast, nor direful clang of smitten anvils loud with shaping sword

Virgil: Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?

Virgil: The War-god pitiless moves wrathful through the world

Elio Vittorini: Dialogue between a dead soldier and his brother

Elio Vittorini: Slaughter perpetrated in the world; one man cries and another laughs

Voltaire: Selections on war

Voltaire: Annals with no mention of any war undertaken at any time

Voltaire: Armies composed of well disciplined hirelings who determine the fate of nations

Voltaire: Bellicose father or pacific son?

Voltaire: He did not put a sufficient number of his fellow creatures to death

Voltaire: Invoking the gods of war

Voltaire: The laws of robbers and war

Voltaire: Million regimented assassins traverse Europe from one end to the other, to get their bread by regular depredation and murder

Voltaire: Mortals, you’re bound by sacred tie, therefore those cruel arms lay by

Voltaire: Must Europe never cease to be in arms?

Voltaire: One country cannot conquer without making misery for another

Voltaire: War

Voltaire: Why prefer a war to the happy labors of peace?

Louise B. Waite: Let There Be Peace

W. S. Walker: Furies learn’d to blush at human crimes

W. S. Walker: One last sanguinary conquest

Edgar Wallace: Or wars would be impossible

Edgar Wallace: War

Edmund Waller: Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won

Horace Walpole: Selections on war and peace

Horace Walpole: Deplorable success in destroying any of our species

Horace Walpole: The glory of war and soldiering

Horace Walpole: How end all our victories?

Horace Walpole: I prefer the old hen Peace

Horace Walpole: I wish there were an excuse for not growing military mad

Horace Walpole: Oh! where is the dove with the olive-branch!

Horace Walpole: Peace and propagation

Horace Walpole: Peace is the sole event of which I wish to hear

Horace Walpole: Stuffing hospitals with maimed soldiers, besides making thousands of widows!

Horace Walpole: We peaceable folks are now to govern the world

Horace Walpole: Who gives a nation peace, gives tranquility to all

Hugh Walpole: Selections on war

Hugh Walpole: Continual screaming, men without faces

Hugh Walpole: The dark, crippling advent of war

Hugh Walpole: Dream of horror: the false reality of war

Hugh Walpole: It would indeed be a disheartening sight….

Hugh Walpole: War both protracts and strangles youth

Hugh Walpole: War killed Henry James

Henry Ward: Ode to Peace

Rex Warner: These guns were sent to save civilisation

Gretchen Warren: Dying Peace

Thomas Warton: Not seek in fields of blood his warrior bays

Jakob Wassermann: Was there ever since the world began a just cause for war?

Gilbert Waterhouse: “This is the last of wars – this is the last!”

William Watson: Curse my country for its military victory

William Watson: Dream of perfect peace

Albert Durrant Watson: A Prayer for Peace

Isaac Watts: Clamor, and wrath, and war, begone

Theodore Watts-Dunton: Seat above the conflict, power to call Peace like a Zephyr

Edwin Waugh: Who strives to make the world a home where peace and justice meet

Maurice C. Waugh: A Plea for Peace

H.G. Wells: Selections on war

H.G. Wells: The abolition of war will be a new phase in the history of life

H.G. Wells: Armaments: Vile and dangerous industry in the human blood trade

H.G. Wells: Either man will put an end to air war or air war will put an end to mankind

H.G. Wells: For the predetermined losing side, modern wars an unspeakable business

H.G. Wells: Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs and his speech is blunt and plain

H.G. Wells: Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war.

H.G. Wells: Nearly everybody wants peace but nobody thinks out the arrangements needed

H.G. Wells: No more talk of honour and annexations, hegemonies and trade routes, but only Europe lamenting for her dead

H.G. Wells: None so detestable as the god of war

H.G. Wells: A number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives to great task of peace

H.G. Wells: The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny

H.G. Wells: A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide

H.G. Wells: Universal collapse logically follows world-wide war

H.G. Wells: War is a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the dead

H.G. Wells: War, road to complete extinction or to degradation beyond our present understanding

H.G. Wells: War will leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children

H.G. Wells: When war comes home

H.G. Wells: Why did humanity gape at the guns and do nothing? War as business

H.G. Wells: The world is weary of this bloodshed, weary of all this weeping

H.G. Wells: The young are the food of war

Franz Werfel: Selections on war

Franz Werfel: Advent of air war and apocalyptic visions

Franz Werfel: Cities disintegrated within seconds in the Last War

Franz Werfel: Don’t you hear the roar of the bombers, the clatter of heavy machine guns that envelop the globe?

Franz Werfel: How describe in a few words a world war?

Franz Werfel: Leaders’ fear of their people drives them to war

Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time

Franz Werfel: Twenty thousand well-preserved human skulls of the Last War

Franz Werfel: Waging currish, cowardly war to plunder the poor

Franz Werfel: War behind and in front, outside and inside

Franz Werfel: War is the cause and not the result of all conflicts

John Werge: Battle in hell if war ye must

Charles Wesley: No horrid alarm of war shall break our eternal repose

James H. West: No More

Nathanael West: Selections on war

Nathanael West: Every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition

Nathanael West: The noble motives, the noble methods of war

Nathanael West: Not their fault, they thought they had bombed a hospital

Nathanael West: One live recruit is better than a dozen dead veterans

Nathanael West: They haven’t the proper military slant

Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war

Phillis Wheatley: From every tongue celestial Peace resounds

Robert Whitaker: The Starred Mother

Robert Whitaker: Whence Cometh War?

John Whitehouse: Ode to War

Walt Whitman: Away with themes of war! away with war itself!

Anna M. Whitney: The Call for Peace

John Greenleaf Whittier: Selections on peace and war

John Greenleaf Whittier: Disarmament

John Greenleaf Whittier: The Gospel of Christ is peace, not war, and love, not hatred

John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?

John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels

John Greenleaf Whittier: Nobler than the sword’s shall be the sickle’s accolade

John Greenleaf Whittier: The stormy clangor of wild war music o’er the earth shall cease

G. J. Whyte-Melville: Death is gathering his harvest – and the iron voice tolls on

G. J. Whyte-Melville: A soldier who fattens a battlefield, encumbers a trench, has his name misspelled in a gazette

Margaret Widdemer: After War

Margaret Widdemer: A Mother to the War-Makers

Margaret Widdemer: Men have to wage world-wars, children are left to die

Margaret Widdemer: War-March

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Selections on peace and war

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: The Paean of Peace

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Plea To Peace

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: What We Need

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: When the Regiment Came Back

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Women and War

Jane Wilde: Peace with the Olive, and Mercy with the Palm

Oscar Wilde: Antidote to war

Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia

Oscar Wilde: Who would dare to praise the barren pride of warring nations?

Helen Maria Williams: Heaven-born peace

Helen Maria Williams: Now burns the savage soul of war

Sarah Williams: Groaning for him they slew

John Wilmot: With war I’ve not to do

D. A. Wilson: Who Won the War?

Thomas Wolfe: His imperial country at war, possessed of the inspiration for murder

Thomas Wolfe: Santimony and cant of war

Women writers on peace and war

Clement Wood: Seedtime and harvest

Clement Wood: Victory – Without Peace

George Edward Woodberry: American I am; would wars were done

Margaret L. Woods: The forgotten slain

William Wordsworth: Selections on peace and war

William Wordsworth: All merit centered in the sword; battle’s hecatombs

William Wordsworth: Earth’s groaning field, where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars

William Wordsworth: If men with men in peace abide, all other strength the weakest may withstand

William Wordsworth: Peace in these feverish times is sovereign bliss

William Wordsworth: Proclaimed heroes for strewing meadows with carcasses

William Wordsworth: Prophetic harps were singing, “War shall cease”

William Wordsworth: Spreading peaceful ensigns over war’s favourite playground

Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage

Philip Stanhope Worsley: Not with iron steeped in slaughter

Henry Wotton: Pastorale. No wars are seen.

Thomas Wyatt: Children of the gun

Thomas Wyatt: Wax fat on innocent blood: I cannot leave the state to Caesar

Elinor Wylie: Peace falls unheeded on the dead

Hedd Wynn: War

Xenophon: Selections on war and peace

Xenophon: Begin wars as tardily, end them as speedily as possible

Xenophon: Guile without guilt. Peace and joy reigned everywhere.

Xenophon: Socrates’ prescription for averting the calamities of war

Xenophon: Socrates’ war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues

Xenophon: War as obsession, warfare as mistress

Ann Yearsley: The anarchy of war

William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace

Barbara Young: Peace is not bought with dead men slain

Edward Young: Selections on peace and war

Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord

Edward Young: End of war the herald of wisdom and poetry

Edward Young: No more the rising harvest whets the sword, now peace, though long repuls’d, arrives at last

Edward Young: Reason’s a bloodless conqueror, more glorious than the sword

Edward Young: Such a peace that follows war

Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars

Leonid Zhukhovitsky: May the book prove more powerful than the bomb

Lajos Zilahy: Called, not without justice, the Third World War

Lajos Zilahy: The greatest efforts were concentrated on the greatest of human problems: how to kill.

Émile Zola: Selections on war

Émile Zola on war mania: A blind and deaf beast let loose amid death and destruction, laden with cannon-fodder

Émile Zola: Bloody pages of history, the wars, the conquests, the names of the captains who had butchered their fellow-beings.

Émile Zola: Encomiums on labor and peace

Émile Zola: The forge of peace and the pit of war

Émile Zola: Haunted by military matters

Émile Zola: The military, necessary apprenticeship for devastation and massacre

Émile Zola: One sole city of peace and truth and justice

Émile Zola: Prescription for a happy life in the midst of universal peace

Émile Zola: To what field of disaster would it be taken to kill men? what harvest of human lives would it reap?

Émile Zola: Vulcan in service to Mars

Émile Zola: War’s vast slaughterhouse

Émile Zola: Why armies are maintained

Émile Zola: Yes, war is dead. The world has reached its last stage. Brothers may now give each other the fraternal kiss.

Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones

Arnold Zweig: Selections on war

Arnold Zweig: Conducting the business of murder with embittered reluctance

Arnold Zweig: The costs of war are spiritual and moral desolation, economic catastrophes and political reaction

Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun

Arnold Zweig: The final trump in the struggle for world markets: the Gun

Arnold Zweig: From the joy of the slayer to being dimly aware of the man on the other side

Arnold Zweig: In the war you’ve lost all the personality you’ve ever had

Arnold Zweig: Keep the war going to the last drop of – other – people’s blood

Arnold Zweig: The meaning, or rather the meaninglessness, of war

Arnold Zweig: Mere existence of armies imposes upon mankind the mentality of the Stone Age

Arnold Zweig: Military strips nation of all that is worthy of defense

Arnold Zweig: Never again! On reading Barbusse

Arnold Zweig: No joy to be born into world of war

Arnold Zweig: Of course, one had to shoot at crowds of civilians, men, women and children

Arnold Zweig: Only the wrong people are killed in a war

Arnold Zweig: The plague has always played a part in war

Arnold Zweig: Pro-war clerks and clerics are Herod’s mercenaries

Arnold Zweig: Reason is the highest patriotism and militarism is evil its very essence

Arnold Zweig: They won no more ground than they could cover with their corpses

Arnold Zweig: War a deliberate act, not an unavoidable natural catastrophe

Arnold Zweig: War, a gigantic undertaking on the part of the destruction industry

Arnold Zweig: War of all against all, jaded multitudes of death

Arnold Zweig: War transforms rescue parties into murder parties

Arnold Zweig: War was in the world, and war prevailed

Arnold Zweig: War’s brutality, folly and tyranny practiced even on its own

Arnold Zweig: War’s communion, hideous multiplication of human disasters

Arnold Zweig: War’s hecatomb from the air, on land and at sea

Arnold Zweig: Whole generation shed man’s blood, whole generation to be poured forth in vats of blood

Stefan Zweig: Selections on peace and war

Stefan Zweig: The army of the spirit, not the army of force

Stefan Zweig: The bloody cloud-bank of war will give way to a new dawn

Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria

Stefan Zweig: The fruits of peace, the drive toward war

Stefan Zweig: “How much rottenness there is in war”

Stefan Zweig: I would never have believed such a crime on the part of humanity possible

Stefan Zweig: Idea of human brotherhood buried by the grave-diggers of war

Stefan Zweig: The idealism which sees beyond blood-drenched battlefields

Stefan Zweig: Opposition to war, a higher heroism still

Stefan Zweig: Origin of the Nobel Peace Prize

Stefan Zweig: Propaganda is as much war matériel as arms and planes

Stefan Zweig: Romain Rolland and the campaign against hatred

Stefan Zweig: A single conscience defies the madness of war

Stefan Zweig: Stendhal, in war but not of it

Stefan Zweig: War, the ultimate betrayal of the intellectuals

Stefan Zweig: The whole world of feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized

Stefan Zweig: World war and Romain Rolland, the conscience of the worldAlejo Carpentier: War’s long reach