• "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy."
  -- John Quincy Adams

  
  

• "In war, the stronger overcomes the weaker. In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker."
  -- Frederic Bastiat

  
  

• "War is the health of the State."
  -- Randolph Bourne

  
  

• "No one has deputized America to play Wyatt Earp to the world."
  -- Patrick J. Buchanan

  
  

• "Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
  -- Noam Chomsky
  
• "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism--how passionately I hate them!"
  -- Albert Einstein

  
  

• "The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war."
  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  
  

• "Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army."
  -- Edward Everett

  
  

• "Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land or at least to control the government or resources of another people."
  -- John T. Flynn

  
  

• "There never was a good war or a bad peace."
  -- Benjamin Franklin, (1773)

  
  

• "Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
  -- Benjamin Franklin

  
  

• "The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."
  -- David Friedman

  
  

• "Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood."
  -- Mahatma Gandhi

  
  

• "In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them."
  -- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk

  
  

• "Older men declare war. But it is the youth who must fight and die."
  -- Herbert Hoover

  
  

• "The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force."
  -- Thomas Jefferson

  
  

• "Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto."
  -- Thomas Jefferson, (1799)

  
  

• "Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted."
  -- Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1802

  
  

• "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
  -- James Madison

  
  

• "Under the benign influence of our republican institutions, and the maintenance of peace with all nations whilst so many of them were engaged in bloody and wasteful wars, the fruits of a just policy were enjoyed in an unrivaled growth of our faculties and resources."
  -- James Madison, First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1809)

  
  

• "Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."
  -- James Madison

  
  

• "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
  -- James Madison

  
  

• "Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."
  -- Groucho Marx

  
  

• "Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them."
  -- Thomas Paine

  
  

• "An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot."
  -- Thomas Paine

  
  

• "All government wars are unjust."
  -- Murray N. Rothbard

  
  

• "It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society."
  -- Murray N. Rothbard

  
  

• "The State thrives on war – unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed – expands on it, glories in it."
  -- Murray N. Rothbard

  
  

• "The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire."
  -- Joseph Sobran

  
  

• "In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war who can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on."
  -- Sun Tzu (author of The Art of War)

  
  

• "All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
  -- Voltaire

  
  

• "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices."
  -- Voltaire

  
  

• "No citizen of a liberal and democratic nation profits from a victorious war."
  -- Ludwig von Mises

  
  

• "[T]he essence of so-called war prosperity; it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income."
  -- Ludwig von Mises

  
  

• "Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking."
  -- Ludwig von Mises

  
  

• "War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods."
  -- Ludwig von Mises

  
  

• "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings."
  -- Ludwig von Mises

  
  

• "Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly."
  -- Ludwig von Mises

  
  

• "It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world."
  -- George Washington