Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

Peace is not sought in order to provoke war, but war is waged in order to attain peace.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

Like it or not, war is distinctively human. Apart from the raiding behavior of chimpanzees and the so-called wars prosecuted by certain species of ant, there is nothing in nature that comes anywhere near approximating it.

I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.

War is not to be waged in the name of God.

History teaches that, when powerful despots can gain something through aggression, they try, by the same methods, to gain more and more and more.

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.

Since the survival impulse in nature is transmuted into two different and contradictory spiritualized forms, which we may briefly designate as the will-to-live-truly and the will-to-power, man is at variance with himself. The power of the second impulse places him more fundamentally in conflict with his fellowman than democratic liberalism realizes.