Women's Reflections on War

ROSALIE MAGGIO / Street Spirit 1mar04

The following thought-provoking words about war were selected by Rosalie Maggio, editor of The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women.

Etching by Art Hazelwood from his series of etchings "Hubris Corpulentus"

1. War is the unfolding of miscalculations. BARBARA W. TUCHMAN, The Guns of August, 1962
2. Before a war, military science seems a real science, like astronomy. After a war it seems more like astrology. REBECCA WEST, in Jonathon Green, Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations, 1982
3. The people who are doing the work and the fighting and the dying, and those who are doing the talking, are not at all the same people. KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, "American Statement" (1942), The Days Before, 1952
4. All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them. EMMA GOLDMAN, "Address to the Jury," Mother Earth, July 1917
5. It is the people who have no say in making wars who suffer most from the consequences of them. PHILIPPA CARR, The Gossamer Cord, 1992
6. War has crossed out the day and replaced it with horror, and now horrors are unfolding instead of days. ZLATA FILIPOVIC (young Bosnian diarist), Zlata's Diary, 1994
7. History more often records the brilliant successes and spectacular defeats of contending forces than the effect of war on the common people. MILDRED CABLE, with Francesca French, The Gobi Desert, 1942
8. The calamity of war, wherever, whenever and upon whomever it descends, is a tragedy for the whole of humanity. RAISA M. GORBACHEV, I Hope, 1991
9. You can no more win a war than you can win an earth-quake. JEANNETTE RANKIN, in Hannah Josephson, Jeannette Rankin, 1974
10. All of the horror of the twentieth century should surely teach us that war feeds on itself and that armed violence reflects, not an extension of politics by other means, but the failure of politics; not the defense of civilization, but the breakdown of civilization. ROSALIND P. PETCHESKY, "Phantom Towers," in Ms., 2002
11. Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves. BARBARA EHRENREICH, in Los Angeles Times, 2003
12. The practice of violence. like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world. HANNAH ARENDT, "On Violence," Crises of the Republic. 1972
13. 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. An Autobiography, 1977
14. No war can end war except a total war which leaves no human creature on earth. Each war creates the causes of war: hate, desire for revenge and have-nots, desperate with  need. ZELDA POPKIN, Open Every Door, 1956
15. From the earliest wars of men to our last heartbreaking worldwide effort, all we could do was kill ourselves. Now we are able to kill the future. MARTHA GELLHORN, The Face of War, 1959
16. No war, not even to punish an aggressor, is a good thing. Today people must learn to take into account each others' interests, if only for the sake of their own survival. I do not believe that... the point where politics and simple human morality intersect is only idealism. RAISA M. GORBACHEV, I Hope, 1991
17. War will hit you hard / coming at you like lions raging. HIND BINT UTBA, "Fury Against the Moslems at Uhud" (7th century), in Joanna Bankier & Deirdre Lashgari, eds., Women Poets of the World, 1983
18. Boredom!!! Shooting!!! Shelling!!! People being killed!!! Despair! ! ! Hunger!!! Misery!!! Fear!!! That's my life! ZLATA FILIPOVIC (young Bosnian diarist), ZIata's Diary, 1994
19. War brutalizes all whom it touches; if it did not do so it could not be endured. AGNES NEWTON KEITH, Three Came Home. 1947
20. The worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being. ELLEN KEY, War, Peace, and the Future, 1916
21. There's a^, consensus out that it's OK to kill when your government decides who to kill. If you kill inside the country you get in trouble. If you kill outside the country, right time, right season, latest enemy, you get a medal. , JOAN BAEZ, Daybreak, 1968
22. Everything you do in a war is crime in peace. HELEN McCLOY, A Change of Heart, 1973
23. If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too. KATHERINE ANNE PORTER. "The Situation in American Writing" (1939), The Days Before, 1952
24. I don^'t believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! ANNE FRANK, The Diary of a Young Girl, 1952
25. Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations.... The root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which every-body must, to some extent, bear the blame. DOROTHY L. SAYERS, "Why Work?" Creed or Chaos? 1949
26. There never was a war that was / not inward; I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war. MARIANNE MOORE, "In Distrust of Merits," Nevertheless, 1944
27. How many are dying / from the taxes I've paid / with my tired hands? CHRYSTOS, "Down," Dream On, 1991
28. War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation: thousands of volts jolting the system. an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. ADRIENNE RICH, What Is Found There, 1993
29. All wars are in reality money squabbles. MARGARET MITCHELL. Gone With the Wind, 1936
30. You truly point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated, and that we shall not, even if we abolish war, abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath?
            And do we waste ours now in protesting against war? ROSE MACAULAY, "An Open Letter" (1937), in Jane Emery, Rose Macaulay, 1991
31. The first casualty in every war is truth. MURIEL LESTER, It Occurred to Me, 1937
32. The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies. HANNAH ARENDT, On Revolution, 1963
33. Waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites. SAMANTHA POWER, "How To Kill a Country," in Atlantic, 2003
34. America is addicted to wars of distraction. BARBARA EHRENREICH, in The Times, 1991
35. It isn't enough to talk about peace; one must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it; one must work at it. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, Voice of America radio, 11 November 1951
36. We have thought of peace as a letting go and war as a girding up. We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences. M.P. FOLLETT, The New State, 1918
37. While all the pomp and circumstance of war animated others, it only saddened me; and all of past reflection, all of future dread, made the whole grandeur of the martial scene, and all the delusive seduction of martial music, fill my eyes frequently with tears. FANNY BURNEY (1802), in Charlotte Barrett, ed., Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, vol. 6, 1842
38. Marx was wrong: It is not only the "means of production" that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or just war readiness, are daunting.... The resulting cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best termed a "depleted" state, in which the military has drained resources from all other social functions. BARBARA EHRENREICH. in Los Angeles Times. 2003
39. Our human situation no longer permits us to make armed dichotomies between those who are good and those who are evil, those who are right and those who are wrong. The first blow dealt to the enemy's children will sign the death warrant of our own. MARGARET MEAD, Continuities in Cultural Evolution, 1964
40. I do not want to see mothers and fathers digging graves for their children. AUDREY HEPBURN, on her work for UNICEF, in Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn, 1994
41. It would be impossible to explain the last war to these children, let alone preparations for another. They really know about war and what it does to life.... Adults could not persuade these small survivors that it is always necessary to make the world safe for democracy, but never safe for children. MARTHA GELLHORN, "The Children Pay," in The Saturday Evening Post, 1949
42. When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong. EDNA FERBER, A Kind of Magic, 1963
43. I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?" EVE MERRIAM, in Peacemaking: Day by Day, 1989

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Rosalie Maggio is the best-selling author of How to Say It: Choice Words, Phrases, Sentences, and Paragraphs for Every Situation and Talking About People: A Guide to Fair and Accurate Language.