Basil O'Connor famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies
-- Basil O'Connor

#Peace #War #Ubuntu

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
The journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. So we must never neglect any work of peace within our reach, however small.
A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that.
The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?
No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.
Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.
This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

Basil O'Connor famous quotes

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