Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.

Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?

"Look now — in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training."

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.

If two men fight in the streets the policeman separates them and everybody thinks how silly they are. But how much sillier and more foolish is it for great countries to fight each other and kill thousands and millions.

The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication

Why humans kill each other is beyond my comprehension, but I can testify that you have been doing it since your inception. Only the weapons change.

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, we have been told that
the federal government has the answers to solve all of society’s problems.
We have been promised, by supposedly serious men who have
sworn an oath before God and man, that if we just give Washington,
D.C., more of our money and more of our personal freedom, the
problems of poverty, illiteracy, racism, unemployment, crime, and
corruption will all be solved. Today, each and every one of these
problems is worse than it has ever been. The federal government and
its blood-sucking bureaucracies do not have a solution to the problem,
they are the problem.

Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

One of the fables we live by is that some day the killing will stop. If only we rid ourselves of Chinese, white men will have jobs and white women will have virtue, and then we can stop killing. If only we rid ourselves of Indians, we will fulfill our Manifest Destiny, and then we can stop killing. If only we rid ourselves of Canaanites, we will live in the Promised Land, and then we can stop killing. If only we rid ourselves of Jews, we can build and maintain a Thousand Year Reich, and then we can stop killing. If only we stop the Soviet Union, we can stop the killing (remember the Peace Dividend that never materialized?). If only we can take out the worldwide terrorist network of bin Laden and others like him. If only. But the killing never stops. Always a new enemy to be hated is found.

The problem is not merely man against man or nation against nation. It is man against war.

The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.

In peace sons bury their fathers; in war fathers bury their sons.