Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.