A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other.

It’s always interesting about God because it’s like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

I’m doing more of my U.N. work and doing the African Union Summit and things like that.

In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

There’s no doubt that usually a president’s public image is enhanced by going to war. That never did appeal to me.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars – yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

A lot has happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it’s been tested by recession and all manner of challenges – I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

War is the province of danger.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

For a sitting U.S. president to see our allies as freeloaders is nuts.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the authorities of Pakistan, a Muslim country of almost 200 million inhabitants, whose laws have been violated, its national dignity offended, and its religious traditions desecrated.

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt’s time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it’s different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

Some of the generals are saying, ‚We’re making progress. We are clearing an area.‘ But you really don’t defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.

The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless; it must be important enough to be worth the trouble; it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

As far as U.S. intelligence knows, Iran is developing nuclear capacities, but they don’t know if they are trying to develop nuclear weapons or not. Chances are they’re developing what’s called ‚nuclear capability,‘ which many states have. That is the ability to have nuclear weapons if they decide to do it. That’s not a crime.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China – the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

I don’t see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that’s almost inconceivable.

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

Pakistan is not a unified country.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.

NATO was constructed on the – with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?