War is a defeat for humanity.
Pope John Paul II

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.
Pope John Paul II

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
Niccolo Machiavelli

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.
Niccolo Machiavelli

War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.
Niccolo Machiavelli

War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.
James Madison

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.
James Madison

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

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.
James Madison

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
Thomas A. Edison

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
George Orwell

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
George Orwell

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
George Orwell

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
George Orwell

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
George Orwell

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
George Orwell

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
George Orwell