"What world can afford this sort of thing for long? We are in an armaments race. Where will it lead us...At best, to robbing every people and nation on earth of the fruits of their own toil."
Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:
a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war,
it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
— General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his speech The Chance for Peace (1953)
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: eisenhower, military spending, neocons, peace, quotations, the military-industrial complex, the war on terror, war
Brigadier General Daniel Morgan, inspiration for the move The Patriot, was the best tactician of the Revolution...and opposed to preemptive war
As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life, and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived — a Defensive war I think a righteous war to Defend my life & property & that of my family, in my own opinion, is right & justifiable in the sight of God.
An offensive war, I believe to be wrong and would therefore have nothing to do with it, having no right to meddle with another man’s property, his ox or his ass, his man servant or his maid servant or anything this is his. Neither does he have a right to meddle with anything that is mine, if he does I have a right to defend it by force.
— Brigadier General Daniel Morgan of the American Revolutionary War, letter to Miles Etting (1798)
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: cowpens, daniel morgan, defensive war, doves, founding fathers, general daniel morgan, god, government, hawks, just war, letters, liberty, mel gibson, natural rights, offensive war, peace, private property, property rights, quakers, quotation, quotations, quote, quotes, sayings, the patriot, war, war pigs, warmongering
Any time someone tells you that even an unfair law needs to be obeyed, ask him if he thinks Schindler was doing the wrong thing
You assist an unjust administration most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil administration never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil.
A good person will resist an evil system with his whole soul.
Disobedience of the laws of an evil state is therefore a duty.
– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: civil disobedience, disobedience, evil, gandhi, law, laws, legality, mohandas gandhi, non-violent resistence, obedience, peace, peaceful resistence, quotation, quotations, quote, quotes, sayings, schindler's list, unjust administration, unjust laws
All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.
— Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Mary Hewson, Jan. 27. 1783
Like this:
Like Loading...
Tags: afghanistan, arbitration, ben franklin, benjamin franklin, bush, casualties, conflict, death, destruction, folly, iraq, mankind, military, obama, peace, prosperity, soldiers, war, warfare
Words of the Sentient 