105 Important Anti War Quotes To Encourage World Peace
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To achieve world peace, anti-war quotes are important.
Anti-war means to oppose wars or how war is conducted. There are so many anti-war quotes, in general, and about lots of different wars that have happened all over the world.
Against the Vietnam War, the famous anti-war movement began on college campuses in the US. The purpose of this movement was to encourage world peace and end American intervention in the war in Veitnam. Many inspiring anti-Vietnam War quotes have emerged from this period in history.
We have curated a list of 105 wise anti-war quotes meant to encourage world peace from authors including Leo Tolstoy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, James Madison, Ernest Hemingway, George W Bush, Howard Zinn, and many more. Why not share these anti-war quotes with your friends and family, to spread the message far and wide?
Check out these activism quotes and protest quotes too, for a variety of other inspiring quotes to read.
The Best Anti-War Quotes
A list of the best anti-war quotes is given below.
1. “I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence.”
―Mahatma Gandhi.
2. “The more money you spend on guns, the less money you spend on people! More weapons, less happiness; more guns, more misery!”
―Mehmet Murat İldan.
3. “Nations who are proud of their guns, tanks, missiles etc. are deprived of humanity!”
―Mehmet Murat İldan.
4. “It’s time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.”
-Jesse Jackson.
5. “We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
-Jimmy Carter.
6. “No more war, war never again! Peace, it is peace, which must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.”
-Pope Paul VI.
7. "War settles nothing."
-Dwight D Eisenhower.
8. "War... is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer."
-Thomas Jefferson.
9. “Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.”
-Albert Einstein.
10. “How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.”
-Albert Einstein.
Famous Anti-War Quotes
Some famous anti-war quotes are listed below. Why not share these famous anti-war quotes with others to promote peace?
11. “You don't liberate a country standing on the soil of another.”
―Fadia Faqir, ‘Willow Trees Don't Weep’.
12. “My religion is based on truth and nonviolence.”
-Mahatma Gandhi.
13. “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”
-Benjamin Franklin.
14. “There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.”
-George Washington.
15. “Peace is not achieved by controlling nations, but mastering our thoughts.”
-John Harricharan.
16. “If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte.
17. “Never, ‘for the sake of peace and quiet,’ deny your own experience or convictions.”
-Dag Hammarskjold.
18. "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."
-Albert Einstein.
19. “Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.”
-Martin Amis.
20. “Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”
-Victor Hugo.
21. “Make no mistake: the anti-war voices long for us to lose any war they cannot prevent.”
-Ralph Peters.
22. “My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.”
-Kevin Powers.
23. “Peace is constructed, not fought for.”
-Brent Davis.
24. “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
-Albert Einstein.
Anti-War Quotes By Famous Personalities
A list of some anti-war quotes said by famous personalities is given below.
25. “There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.”
-Mahatma Gandhi.
26. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
-Albert Einstein.
27. “Just war theory has been converted into a form of apologetics for whatever atrocities your favored state is carrying out.”
―Noam Chomsky.
28. “War is like a vacuum cleaner that sucks tax dollars out of your pocket and funnels the money directly into the pockets of the robber barons who own the weapons factories.”
―Oliver Markus Malloy.
29. “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”
-George Washington.
30. "People do not make wars; governments do."
-Ronald Reagan.
31. “War does not determine who is right, only who is left.”
-Bertrand Russell.
32. “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
-James Madison.
33. "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. "
34. “It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”
-George Washington.
35. “No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville.
36. "The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war."
-James Madison.
Peace Quotes
Some quotes about peace are given below.
37. “We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.”
-Dwight D Eisenhower.
38. “Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”
-Dwight D Eisenhower.
39. “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that, one of these days, governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
-Dwight D Eisenhower.
40. “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
-Albert Einstein.
41. “I was once asked why I don't participate in anti war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.”
―Mother Teresa.
42. “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.
43. “Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.”
-Milan Kundera.
44. "Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means."
-Ronald Reagan.
45. “The greatest personalities that ever existed have been those who united human beings and put them on the road toward cooperation and effectiveness and peace. Those whom the world has held highest have helped to unite and not sever interconnectedness. They have not been the destroyers of differences but the harmonizer of differences.”
-John Lovejoy Elliott.
Popular Anti-War Quotes
Given below are some popular anti-war quotes.
46. “If you like war, be a nationalist. If you like peace, be a citizen of the world.”
―Oliver Markus Malloy.
47. “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
-George Orwell.
48. "Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.”
-Ludwig Von Mises.
49. "What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood."
-Aldous Huxley.
50. “Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.”
-Ludwig Von Mises.
51. “War, in the end, is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.”
-Chris Hedges.
52. “Europeans are far more anti war than Americans. They've had more wars, and they really just don't believe in it anymore.”
-Mark Kurlansky.
53. "It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
-Albert Einstein.
54. "A people free to choose will always choose peace."
-Ronald Reagan.
55. “Only in time of fear is government thrown back to its primitive and sole function of self defense and the many interests of which it is the guardian become subordinate to that.”
56. “The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny...”
57. "Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."
-John Adams.
58. “Every good war film, if you want to use that phrase - I don't think it's a good phrase, but if you want to use that phrase - every good film, a first-rate film about war, is an anti war movie."
-Michael Cimino.
Courage Quotes
Some anti-war quotes about courage are given below.
59. “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.”
-Mahatma Gandhi.
60. “Courage is grace under pressure.”
-Ernest Hemingway.
61. “The greatest test of courage on the earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.”
-R. G. Ingersoll.
62. “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
–Winston Churchill.
63. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.”
-Soren Kierkegaard.
64. “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”
–Winston Churchill.
65. “Courage is being scared to death—but saddling up anyway.”
–John Wayne.
66. “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
–Marie Curie.
67. “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
―Aristotle.
Quotes About War
A list of quotes about war is given below, including some 'Slaughterhouse-Five' anti-war quotes.
68. “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”
-Thomas Jefferson.
69. “Once we have a war, there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.”
–Ernest Hemingway.
70. "In all history, there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."
-Leo Tolstoy.
71. "War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
-George Orwell.
72. “What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”
―Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’.
73. “Yes, there are plenty of politicians who are liars, there is no doubt about this! But some of them are not only liars but also serial killers because they deliberately send people to the wars!”
―Mehmet Murat İldan.
74. "To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
—Calgacus.
75. “War is what happens when language fails.”
―Margaret Atwood.
76. “No war is inevitable until it breaks out.”
-AJP Taylor.
77. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
―Plato.
78. “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”
―John Steinbeck.
79. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”
-General William T. Sherman.
80. "The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor."
-George Orwell.
81. “When a war breaks out, people say: 'It's too stupid, it can't last long.' But though a war may be 'too stupid,' that doesn't prevent its lasting.”
-Albert Camus.
82. “Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
-James Madison.
83. "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-James Madison.
Strong Anti-War Quotes
A list of some strong anti-war quotes is given below.
84. “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.”
85. “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education.”
-Thomas Jefferson.
86. “One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”
-Agatha Christie.
87. "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings."
-Ludwig von Mises.
88. “The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”
-Aldous Huxley.
89. “Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.”
-Alan Watts.
90. "It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
-James Madison.
91. “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
-Abba Eban.
92. “War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”
93. “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.”
-Jimmy Carter.
94. “Though times have changed, it's a nice surprise to see that youthful feeling of anti war sentiment returning once more to the cobbled main streets of Europe.”
-Cat Stevens.
Military Quotes
Some military quotes to show respect to the military are given below.
95. “From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”
―Thomas Jefferson.
96. “We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.”
-George Orwell.
97. “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
–Martin Luther King Jr.
98. “Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
–Benjamin Franklin.
99. "If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn to do it?"
—Joan Baez.
100. “Soldiers win battles and generals get the medals.”
–Napoleon Bonaparte.
101. “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”
-Duke of Wellington.
102. “I respect every soldier, from every country, who serves beside us in the hard work of history. America is grateful, and America will not forget.”
-George W Bush.
103. “It would be a joke if the conduct of the victor had to be justified to the vanquished.”
–Napoléon Bonaparte.
104. “The patriot’s blood is the seed of Freedom’s tree.”
–Thomas Campbell.
105. “Military power wins battles, but spiritual power wins wars.”
-George C. Marshall.
Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for 105 anti-war quotes, then why not take a look at these world peace quotes and change the world quotes too?
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Bachelor of Arts specializing in French with Film Studies, Bachelor of Arts (Year Abroad) specializing in Literature, History, Language, Media, and Art
Georgia StoneBachelor of Arts specializing in French with Film Studies, Bachelor of Arts (Year Abroad) specializing in Literature, History, Language, Media, and Art
Georgia is an experienced Content Manager with a degree in French and Film Studies from King's College London and Bachelors degree from Université Paris-Sorbonne. Her passion for exploring the world and experiencing different cultures was sparked during her childhood in Switzerland and her year abroad in Paris. In her spare time, Georgia enjoys using London's excellent travel connections to explore further afield.
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