George Bernard Shaw Quotes About War
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Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid...There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party.
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A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.
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Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
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We all have--to put it as nicely as I can--our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terriblepower that sometimes destroys us; but they don't talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before--truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.
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Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.
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If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.
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There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.
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The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.
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The notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.
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Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
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War does not decide who is right but who is left.
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We are sick of war, we don't want to fight, And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
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There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.
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Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.
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All progress means war with society.
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The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
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War can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly.
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