World War Quotes – Reflective Statements on Historical Events

"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."

Thích Nhất Hạnh

"If you kill one person, you're prosecuted. If you kill ten people, you're famous; if you kill a quarter-of-a-million people, you're invited to a peace conference."

Haris Silajdžić

"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."

Bertolt Brecht

"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."

Harry S. Truman

"Zelensky's intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called "staging": a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics whilst thinking it is not a big deal, but it is just that. The truth of the images is only advancing slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators for… you, like me. We often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder."

Jean-Luc Godard

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Smedley Darlington Butler

"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else."

Tom Clancy

"The masses are never militaristic until their minds are poisoned by propaganda."

Albert Einstein

"If you think mass shooters have killed too many people, just wait till you find out what the governments of disarmed citizens have done."

Kevin Sorbo

"How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print."

Karl Kraus

"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."

George Orwell

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

Winston S. Churchill

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

George Orwell

"What we learn from History is that no one learns from History."

Otto von Bismarck

"The government of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semioccult power which....pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I."

J.F.C. Fuller

"[Bolshevism] among the Jews is nothing new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."

Winston Churchill

"Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind."

John F. Kennedy

"To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens."

Adolf Hitler