Wendell Berry on war and peace

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. … We have been wrong.

Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Thomas Jefferson1743–1826Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787). Manuscript at the Library of Congress.

• Liberty

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.

Dwight D. Eisenhower1890–1969The Chance for Peace (1953)

• Guns

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

George S. Patton1885–1945