- My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all
men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted
the seeds of despotism around your own doors. When men yield up the privilege
of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. To sin by silence
when they should protest makes cowards of men. Indeed, I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep
forever.
If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned
about the peoples of Asia, Africa or South America. Is this not why nations
engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence?
Is this not why the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act
of heroic virtue? Youíre not supposed to be so blind with patriotism
that you canít face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does
it or who says it. I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach
us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish
we may be permitted to pursue it. An inglorious peace is better than a
dishonorable war. War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing
wrongs and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. What is human warfare
but just this: an effort to make the laws of God and Nature take sides
with one party. There never was a good war or a bad peace. It is soldiers
who pay most of the human cost.
Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion
of the foreign world. In the councils of government we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by
the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power exists and will persist. Overgrown military establishments
are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to
be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. While we are guarding the country,
we must accept being the guardian of the finest ethics. The country needs
it and we must do it. Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame
upon the nation that is attacked. But wherever a man goes, men will pursue
him and paw him with their dirty institutions and, if they can, constrain
him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. To be a patriot, one
had to keep on saying ìour country, right or wrongî, and urge
on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult
to the nation?
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. I hate war as only a soldier who has
lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its
stupidity. The people of the world want peace. Some day the leaders
of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.
The above quotations were provided by the following embedded Americans:
Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Malcolm
X, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ben Franklin, Generals Creighton Abrams,
George Washington, and Dwight D. Eisenhower
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- Douglas Herman is an amateur historian and USAF veteran.
You may reach him at douglasherman7@yahoo.com for questions about any quote.
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