Home
> Uncategorized > Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war
Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war
====
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Women writers on peace and war
====
Marianne Moore
From In Distrust of Merit (1944)
Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron
iron is iron till it is rust.
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
I inwardly did nothing.
O Iscariot-like crime!
Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.
Categories: Uncategorized
Leave a comment Cancel reply
Recent Posts
- Jules Michelet: This vile and loathsome war
- Henry Céard: Distressed by uniform decorum of scenes of carnage
- Henry Céard: He affected warlike sentiments
- Fortuné du Boisgobey: One couldn’t dream that behind a peaceful scene men were slaughtering each other
- Hippolyte Taine: Cities perished by hundreds and men by millions
- Ernst Toller: To the Trench
- Léon Gozlan: Simian imitation is the sincerest form
- Emile Faguet: Pacifism and residual obstacles to achieving it
- Jules Lemaître: With the millions that armies cost….
- Paul and Victor Margueritte: So-called victory was in reality purely ineffectual butchery
- Edmond Lepelletier: War is a lottery
- Paul and Victor Margueritte: Selections on war
- Gabriel Chevallier: Let those who love war wage it
- Paul and Victor Margueritte: At the idea of war his heart was filled with disgust
- Michael Arlen: Then the war, and that, of course, buried him
- Gabriel Chevallier: His screams were terrible, enough to shame God
- Paul and Victor Margueritte: Ah! war, the horrible, odious thing!
- Andy Corbley: A Poem for Gaza
- Gabriel Chevallier: Selections on war
- Paul and Victor Margueritte: An indefinite feeling of fraternity seized him
- Gabriel Chevallier: This fact makes armies and wars possible
- Paul and Victor Margueritte: The masses voted for peace but were given war
- Paul and Victor Margueritte: Should war break out, he also might disappear
- Maxime Formant: They would know the ecstasies of sacking conquered cities
- Michael Arlen: Better build monuments to poets and philosophers than to warriors
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Celebrate return of peace by directing readers to noblest works of peace
- H.G. Wells: This little planet everywhere scarred and disfigured by long wars
- George Santayana: Wars prove the world has turned its back on reason
- Gabriel Chevallier: War is not edifying, purifying or redemptive
- H.G. Wells: Blood as printers’ ink
- George Santayana: His parents’ admonitions against war
- H.G. Wells: Chemistry at the service of mass murder
- H.G. Wells: The New Warfare, transition to total war
- George Santayana: Slaughter by the indistinguishable million
- H.G. Wells: Means of destruction kept pace with increase in wealth of mankind
- H.G. Wells: He enjoyed the war. His soldiers are toy soldiers and he loves to knock over a whole row of them.
- George Santayana: William James and Philippines: losing his country by annexing another
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Fleeing from yelp of cur, we took shelter at feet of vicious warhorse
- Gabriel Chevallier: All the threats and horrors summed up in that small word – war
- Gabriel Chevallier: The general’s fatal domestic campaign
- Gabriel Chevallier: War ruins armies
- Plutarch: Culture benefits the family, city, nation, whole human race more than war
- Anthony Powell: The war blew the whole bloody thing up
- Antonine Maillet: That’s enough to give you some idea of what war is
- Pierre Gascar: A kind of temple. The war had stopped at the door.
- Antonine Maillet: When are the soldiers are dead, bombs dropped, maybe we’ll have some peace
- John Ruskin: The arts of peace will supersede the arts of war
- Pierre Gascar: One could read the whole world kindling another war
- Paul Bourget: That dreadful word War
- Antonine Maillet: One day war got declared
- Georges Ohnet: Better to erect statues to those who preserve than those who take life
- Pierre Gascar: Inside the forest, beyond the touch of war
- Georges Ohnet: The thunderbolt of war
- Quintus Smyrnaeus: Ares and his sister maddened there
- Antonio Buero-Vallejo: We must live to abolish forty centuries of killing children
- Michel Déon: How we wish so many others had escaped the slaughter!
- Jules Romains: Never occurred to me that I might find a peaceful and a smiling sky
- Jean Lartéguy: What is a monster? The man who starts a war, whichever side he’s on.
- Pierre Boulle: Earth’s heritage squandered on dangerous expenditure
- Pierre Boulle: Converting the world’s arsenals into granaries
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Building peace is persuading God to enfold all in his shepherd’s cloak
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Back at home in the peace of our villages
- Plutarch: That God sanctions wars
- Henry de Montherlant: We too are widows
- Pierre Mille: I’ve killed a man! You must turn away from me, for I’ve killed a man!
- Hubert Monteilhet: Empire’s mercenaries will devour the metropolis
- Voltaire: I am the grandson of Penn. That name alone will suffice.
- Hubert Monteilhet: Slain by their own swords
- Anyte: Stand here, thou murderous spear
- Agathias Scholasticus: Peace and poetry
- Xenophon: The virtuous prefer untroubled security to sovereignty won by war
- Lucian: The source of civic strife and war
- Plutarch: Instruct not by examples from war
- Strabo: Result of neglecting education for military training
- Appian: Selections on war
- Strabo: The Eleians alone had profound peace
- Dio Chrysostom: Peace, which everybody welcomes
- Isocrates: Making peace, no matter how, better than the evils engendered by war
- Appian: The fate of all great military empires
- Isocrates: Engendering wars to add to ills incident to nature
- Polybius: Why war is really waged
- Appian: The mass of the people denounced the war
- Appian: They needed a great deal of money to carry on war
- Euripides: God of war reaps men like grain
- Bertrand Russell: Selections on war and peace
- Dionysius of Halicarnassus: People exhausted by war, like corpses except they breathed
- Bertrand Russell: Man can destroy civilization or abolish war
- Dio Cassius: “How long are we to be waging war?”
- Dio Cassius: Is it not dreadful that we become engaged in war after war?
- Diodorus Siculus: Those for whom war is peace and peace is war
- James Fenimore Cooper: Always much of exaggeration in both boasting and apologies of war
- Bertrand Russell: War sheds centuries of civilization in one moment
- James Fenimore Cooper: A person who loves someone doesn’t send him to war
- Honoré de Balzac: Keeping the troops out
- Havelock Ellis: Cost of wars in oceans of blood
- Mór Jókai: Selections on war
- Bertrand Russell: Implant in young minds ineradicable horror of slaughter they are now taught to admire
- Honoré de Balzac: Selling war munitions to the devil himself if he has money
- Joseph Conrad: “I have seen all this before I was in years a man”
Blog Stats
- 2,095,651 hits
For peace, against war: literary selections 
Reblogged this on Catholic Glasses and commented:
My sentiments exactly
LikeLike