British writers on peace and war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
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
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
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 well the premeditated mass murder of war is organized
Richard Aldington: It is so important to know how to kill
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?
Grant Allen: War and blood money
James Allen: A Prayer for Peace
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
Edwin Arnold: Heaven’s love descending in that loveliest word, PEACE!
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
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
Alfred Austin: The White Pall of 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!
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
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
Charlotte Alington Barnard: Peace Hovers
Thomas Lovell Beddoes: War’s harvest
Aphra Behn: No rough sound of war’s alarms
Aphra Behn: The pen triumphs over the sword
Hilaire Belloc: After the tempest and destruction of universal war, permanence
Hilaire Belloc: War, propaganda and lies
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
George Berkeley: Continuing dishonorable war is committing murder, rapine, sacrilege and violence
Walter Besant: War and the destruction of London, a city lone and widowed
Matilda Betham: All the horrid charms of war
Augustine Birrell: Richard Cobden, visionary of world peace
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: 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
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
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’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”
George Borrow: Prisoners of war: misery on one side, disgrace on the other
James Boswell: Samuel Johnson – war is worst type of all violence
James Boswell: Who profits by war?
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!
Henry Noel Brailsford: Waiting for the horrors of a war that was coming
Henry Noel Brailsford: Who is the happy warrior?
Robert Bridges: And this is War!
Vera Mary Brittain: August, 1914
Frances Brown: An avenger mightier than war
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
John Buchan: That night I realized the crazy folly of war
Robert Buchanan: The moon gleamed on the dreadful drifts of dead
Edward Bulwer Lytton: Selections on peace and war
Edward Bulwer Lytton: Ghouls on the field of slaughter
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”
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
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
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: 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
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
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
Mary Chandler: The noise of war is hushed
George Chapman: Men’s want of peace, which was from want of love
George Chapman: Peace with all her heavenly seed
Thomas Chatterton: Peace, gentlest, softest of the virtues
Geoffrey Chaucer: The city to the soldier’s rage resigned; successless wars and poverty behind
G.K. Chesterton: In modern war defeat is complete defeat
G. K. Chesterton: War’s regressive tendency
Charles Churchill: Thousands bleed for some vile spot where fifty cannot feed
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
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
William Congreve: Cursed ambition wakes the world to war and ruin
William Congreve: No more do youth leave the sacred arts for stubborn arms
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: Humanity’s inhuman toleration of war
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war
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?
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
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
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: 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
Richard Crashaw: In Hell’s palaces
William Crowe: On poets who sing of war
Ann Batten Cristall: Pity, Liberty, and Peace
Ann Batten Cristall: Relief for nature, man at war with themselves
William Cunningham: A thousand gifts are thine, Sweet Peace! – which War can never know
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
Thomas Day: Wages abhorred war with humankind
Daniel Defoe: Mammon and Mars, twin deities
Thomas Dekker: Lands ravaged by soldiers and war
Charles Dickens: Waging war to perpetuate slavery
Sydney Dobell: The Army Surgeon
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
Augusta Theodosia Drane: It needs must be that gentle Peace prevail!
Michael Drayton: All your banks with peace preserved be
John Drinkwater: I sing of peace while nations market in death
John Drinkwater: We Mothers Know
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
Edward Dyer: So that of war the very name may not be heard again
George Eliot: Tart rebuke of crude war propaganda
Havelock Ellis: War, a relapse from civilisation into barbarism, if not savagery
William Norman Ewer: Five Souls
Eleanor Farjeon: Now that you too join the vanishing armies
George Farquhar: What induced you to turn soldier?
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 mocks and degrades nature, God, mind, commerce, agriculture
Padraic Fiacc: Der Bomben Poet
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
Ford Maddox Ford: Millions massacred for picturesque phrases in politicians’ speeches
Ford Maddox Ford: Preparing men likes bullocks for the slaughterhouse
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
James George Frazer: Purifying the defilement of war
James George Frazer: Saturn’s reign of peace
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: 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
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: The monstrous injustice of conflating chauvinism with common drunkenness
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?
David Garnett: Criminal to welcome war
David Garnett: War is the worst of the epidemic diseases which afflict mankind
John Gay: Parallel lives. Highwaymen and soldiers.
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
George Gissing: Selections on war
George Gissing: “Civilisation rests upon a military basis”
George Gissing: The imposition of military servitude
George Gissing: Large-scale murder as fair sport
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
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Oliver Goldsmith: Selections on war
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: War and its servile press
Edmund Gosse: War and the brutalities of the real thing
John Gower: Peace is chief of all world’s wealth, war is mother of all wrongs
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: 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
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
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: 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
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
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: High-priests of Moloch foam at the mouth at the name of peace
William Hazlitt: Poets outlive conquerors
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
William Hazlitt: War is in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals
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 has still ravaged o’er the blasted plain
George Herbert: Make war to cease
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
Maurice Hewlett: In the Trenches
Maurice Hewlett: O, this war, what a glorious game!
Maurice Hewlett: Who prayeth peace?
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
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
Thomas Holcroft: In wars and wretchedness I cannot say that I delight
Thomas Holcroft: Reaping vast crops of famine, sword, and fire
Thomas Hood: As gentle as sweet heaven’s dew beside the red and horrid drops of war
Thomas Hood: Freelance soldiering
Gerard Manley Hopkins: What pure peace allows alarms of wars?
David Hume: War’s double standards
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
Aldous Huxley: Selections on war
Aldous Huxley: Absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by war
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: 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
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
Richard Jefferies: The raven, a fable
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 K. Jerome: Go for a soldier
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 the extremity of evil
Henry Jones: Bid discord cease, and open wide the gates of peace
John Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
John Keats: The fierce intoxicating tones of trumpets, drums and cannon
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
Charles Lamb: More-wasting War, insatiable of blood
Walter Savage Landor: Some stopped revenge athirst for slaughter
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
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
Vernon Lee: Satan’s rules of war
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
Isabella Lickbarrow: Invocation To Peace
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
Samuel Lover: The demon of war casts his shadows before
Samuel Lover: The trumpet and the sword
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.
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
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Frederic Manning: Blow, wind! Drown the senseless thunder of the guns.
Frederic Manning: Shells hounding through air athirst for blood
Frederic Manning: The Trenches
Frederic Manning: The very mask of God, broken
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
Christopher Marlowe: Parricide and filicide. While lions war, poor lambs perish.
Andrew Marvell: War all this doth overgrow
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
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
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
Alice Meynell: The true slayers are those who sire soldiers
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
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
Mary Russell Mitford: Sheath thy gory blade in peace
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: 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
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
George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine
George Moore: War and disillusionment
Thomas Moore: No trophies but of Love
Thomas More: Battles result from lust for fame and glory
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: The role of soldiers and how they will disappear
William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home
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: Weapons of modern war involve bestialization of humanity
Thomas Nashe: Swords may not fight with fate
Adela Florence Nicolson: Doubtless feasted the jackal and the kite
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: Medicine driven back in defeat by the nightmare chaos of war
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
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
Liam O’Flaherty: The foul horror of war
Liam O’Flaherty: Sounds from a dead world. Nothing but worms and rats feeding on death.
John Oldham: The cup and the sword
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!
Wildred Owen: Selections on war
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Wilfred Owen: From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept
Wilfred Owen: Multitudinous murders they once witnessed
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: 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!
Walter Pater: What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Deity of Slaughter.
Coventry Patmore: Peace in life and art
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!
Stephen Phillips: Appalled at bloody trophies
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Max Plowman: The dead soldiers. Killing men is always killing God.
Max Plowman: The Goddess of War
Joseph Mary Plunkett: Till blooms the bud on olive branch, borne by the bird of peace
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
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
Adelaide A. Procter: Let carnage cease and give us peace!
Arthur Quiller-Couch: Man shall outlast his battles
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
Ernest Rhys: Enough of war, enough of death
Charlotte Richardson: Once more let war and discord cease
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
Samuel Rogers: War and the Great in War let others sing
Samuel Rogers: What tho’ the iron school of War erase each milder virtue…
Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump
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?
George William Russell: Gods of War
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: 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
George Saintsbury: The odious profession
Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man
Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph
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: 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
Ethel Talbot Scheffauer: The sun shall rise upon a newer world that has forgot to kill
John Scott: I hate that drum’s discordant sound
Walter Scott: The diffusion of knowledge, not the effusion of blood
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
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
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: 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: 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
James Shirley: Some men with swords may reap the field and plant fresh laurels where they kill
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
Sydney Smith: War, hailing official murderers as the greatest and most glorious of human creatures
Tobias Smollett: War contractors fattened on the blood of the nation
Tobias Smollett: The war glories of a demagogue
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
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
Herbert Spencer: No patriotism when it comes to wars of aggression
Stephen Spender: Selections on war
Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
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
Marguerite Steen: The sheer destructiveness of war made him angry
Marguerite Steen: The wreckage of the wars
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
G. B. Stern: Conventions of war? War itself is the outrage.
Robert Louis Stevenson: Peace we found where fire and war had been
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
Lytton Strachey: After the battle, who shall say that the corpses were the most unfortunate?
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
Charles Tennant: Nor shall they learn war
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
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?
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!
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
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
Thomas Tickell: The Soldier’s late destroying Hand shall rear new Temples in his native Land
W. R. Titterton: The Silent People of No Man’s Land
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
Anthony Trollope: How wars are arranged
Anthony Trollope: Leader appointed to save the empire – with warships
Anthony Trollope: Sports, reading and war
Henry Vaughan: Let us ‘midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss
Henry Vaughan: What thunders shall those men arraign who cannot count those they have slain?
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
Edmund Waller: Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won
Horace Walpole: Selections on war and peace
Horace Walpole: Deplorable success of 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
Rex Warner: These guns were sent to save civilisation
Thomas Warton: Not seek in fields of blood his warrior bays
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
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
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: 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: 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
John Werge: Battle in hell if war ye must
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
G. J. Whyte-Melville: Death is gathering his harvest – and the iron voice tolls on
Jane Wilde: Peace with the Olive, and Mercy with the Palm
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
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
Ann Yearsley: The anarchy of war
William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace
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: Reason’s a bloodless conqueror, more glorious than the sword
Irish poet Padraic Fiacc said ‘War and Famine are crimes. Against humanity’.
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Thanks for sharing the quote. Although famine can occur without human agency, war is a crime that only humans wage and only humans can prevent.
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Thanks for the repost Rick, but I think Fiacc as correct in his assertion that famine is a crime. In a world where food is daily moved on a global scale, logistically no region should be in food crisis. The current famine in Afghanistan, little reported, is the direct result of a savage twenty year conflict induced by rich western armament corporations. Naturally induced famines could be quickly resolved with a fraction of the billions of dollars available to wage an aggressive unnecessary war against Russia, being made available to build infra structures to eradicate people dying for want of daily food. Padraic Fiacc growing up in a partitioned Ireland knew that Famine and its twin child poverty are indeed crimes against people.
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And thank you for the persuasive explanation. Perhaps I should have written that *historically* famine has occurred quite apart from human agency whereas war is by definition an act of human will….Anything by Fiacc I could post on the site?
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Nick, this very powerful poem by Padraic Fiacc written during the 1970’s is a visceral study of the innocents murdered for what ….?
CHRIST GOODBYE
Dandering home from work at mid
-night, they tripped Him up on a ramp,
Asked Him if He were a ‘Catholic’ …
A wee bit soft in the head He was,
The last person in the world you’d want to hurt:
His arms and legs, broken,
His genitals roasted with a ship-yard
Worker’s blow lamp.
In all the stories that the Christian Brothers
Tell you of Christ He never screamed
Like this. Surely this is not the way
To show a ‘manly bearing’
Screaming for them to PLEASE STOP
And then, later, like screaming for death!
When they made Him wash the stab
Wounds at the sink, they kept on
Hammering Him with the pick-axe handle;
Then they pulled
Christ’s trousers down,
Threatening to ‘Cut off His balls!’
Poor boy Christ, for when
They finally got round to finishing Him off
By shooting Him in the back of the head
‘The poor Fenian fucker was already dead!”
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