There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

"On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.

The wars we haven't had saved many lives.

War has been the norm and peace the exception

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

Humanity wants no more war.

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited . . . What is essential in war is victory, not prolonged operations.

I sometimes refer to it as a war without blood: there are no soldiers in the field, no bullets and bombs.

The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service.

Between 1000 C.E. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Europe was a fifty-one-year stretch between the Battle of Waterloo and the Austro-Prussian War. That tranquil period came amid the industrial revolution, as millions moved from farm to city. Was it harder, for a while, to find soldiers? Or did people feel too busy to fight?

Either war is obsolete or men are.