By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

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

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

A war is a horrible thing, but it’s also a unifier of countries.

He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.

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

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.

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.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

Israelis would mostly breathe a sigh of relief if Palestinians were to disappear.

War is what happens when language fails.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

A siege is an act of war.

The Iranians have shot down drones. They tried to destroy the Saudi oil fields. They tried to storm our embassy. So, when my Democratic friends say we need appeasement, well appeasement hasn’t worked. And I think that we’ve learned, with respect to Iran, that weakness invites the wolves.

Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.

Battle is an orgy of disorder.

This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

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.

Morality is contraband in war.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

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.

In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti – France and the United States – combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no power over the substance of original justice.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

And every human being is precious.

I hate violence, yes I do. It’s kind of a dilemma, huh?.

The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

I think what’s going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the U.S.A. I wouldn’t say it’s the cause of terrorism, but it has given impetus and excuses to potential terrorists to lash out at our country and justify their despicable acts.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

I think what you’re seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they’ve got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out.

War is the business of barbarians.

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 is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

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

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.