The Fourth of July

FOR the day, some quotations:

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

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 one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.
~ Salvador de Madariaga

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
~ Thomas Jefferson

It is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
~ Robert H. Jackson

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.
~ Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to William Short, 28 July 1791).

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville

Criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government.
~ Robert Taft

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
~ George Orwell (From "Homage to Catalonia," Orwell's 1936 eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War.)

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.
~ Joseph Goebbels

One can...never create [freedom] by an invading force.
~ Maximilien Robespierre

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A great war leaves the country with three armies — an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.
~ German proverb

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
~ General Douglas MacArthur

Of all the enemies of 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

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.
~ James Madison

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

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
~ James Madison

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
~ Thomas Mann

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
~ Winston Churchill

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
~ John Adams

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
~ Voltaire