You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.[1]
To secure peace is to prepare for war. War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.[2] It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.[3] The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.[4]
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.[5]
This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.[6] The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting . . . The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.[7]
Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.[8] I have known war as few men now living know it. It’s very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes. War, the most malignant scourge and greatest sin of mankind can no longer be controlled, only abolished. We are in a new era. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.[9]
The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural development of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.[10]
My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.[11] A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.[12] I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.[13]
The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.[14] If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.[15]
[1] Jesus Christ, Matthew 24:6
[2] Carl von Clausewitz
[3] Douglas MacArthur
[4] George Orwell
[5] John Stuart Mill
[6] Douglas MacArthur
[7] Sun Tzu
[8] Ulysses S. Grant
[9] Douglas MacArthur
[10] Douglas MacArthur
[11] Elie Wiesel
[12] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
[13] Martin Luther King, Jr.
[14] John F. Kennedy
[15] George Washington