http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/anti-war-essays-poems-short-stories-and-novel-excerpts/
250 anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Compiled by Rick Rozoff
Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill'd the world with widows and with orphans
Aeschylus: Ares, father of tears, mows the field of man
Aesop: The lies of lupine liberators
Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children's games
Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh
Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession
Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse
Aristotle: Leader not praiseworthy in training citizens for conquest and dominion
Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors
W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Ambrose Bierce: Killed At Resaca
Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Bjà rnstjerne Bjà rnson: All labor's dread of war's mad waste and murder
William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!
Alexander Blok: The kite, the mother and endless war
Boethius: Provoking death's destined day by waging unjust and cruel wars
Wolfgang Borchert: Only one thing to do, say No!
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
Randolph Bourne: War and the State
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North
William Cullen Bryant: Christmas 1875
Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought -- and that was death
Thomas Campbell: The snow shall be their winding-sheet, every turf a soldier's sepulchre
Thomas Campion: Then bloody swords and armour should not be
Albert Camus: Where war lives. The reign of beasts has begun.
Karel Ä'apek: The War with the Newts
Ernesto Cardenal: They speak of peace and secretly prepare for war
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man
Cervantes: Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony
Chateaubriand: Would-be master of the world who knew only how to destroy
Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against "peculiar sanity" of war
Homo homini lupus: William Cowper on war and man's inhumanity to man
Stephen Crane: There was crimson clash of war
Rubà n Darà o: You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes
John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again
John Donne: War and misery are one thing
John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers
1862: Dostoevsky on the new world order
Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket
W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace
Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War's Winnowing Basket
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts
Paul Ã"degreesluard: True law of men despite the misery and war
Erasmus: The Complaint of Peace
Euripides: The crown of War, the crown of Woe
William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
FÃ nelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man
Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
Anatole France on Ã"degreesmile Zola, military terrorism and world peace
Anatole France on Victor Hugo: People to substitute justice and peace for war and bloodshed
Ivan Franko: Even the dove has the blood of men on its snowy white wings
John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare
Rasul Gamzatov: For women war is never over
Gabriel Garcà a Mà rquez: Five wars and seventeen military coups
Andrà Gide: Transformation of a war supporter
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Maxim Gorky on Romain Rolland, war and humanism
Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism
Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next
Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war
Jorge Guillà n: The monsters have passed over
Nicolàs Guillà n: Come, dove, come tell me the tale of your woe
Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war's apology wholly stultified
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war
Josà -Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring
Miguel Hernà ndez: Wretched Wars
Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace
Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace
Alexander Herzen: War and "international law"
Hesiod: Lamentable works of Ares lead to dank house of Hades
Nazim Hikmet: Sad kind of freedom, free to be an American air base
Friedrich HÃ lderlin: Celebration of Peace
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace
Julia Ward Howe: Mother's Day Proclamation 1870
William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War
Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats
Victor Hugo: International Peace Congress 1851
Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen
Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen
Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war
Avetik Issahakian: Eternal fabricators of war, erecting pyramids with a myriad skulls
Jaros..."aw Iwaszkiewicz: The word pax, pax, pax
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
William James: The Philippine Tangle
Joseph Joubert on war: All victors will be defeated
Attila JÃ zsef: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win
Juvenal: Mighty warriors and their tombs are circumscribed by Fate
Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace
Nikos Kazantzakis: Francis of Assisi
Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind
La Bruyà re on the lust for war
La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?
Selma Lagerlà f: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Lamartine: The republic of peace
Sidney Lanier: War by other means
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Stephen Leacock: The war mania of middle age and embonpoint
Sinclair Lewis: It Can("t) Happen Here
Livy: On the political utility of starting unprovoked wars
Federico Garcà a Lorca: War goes crying with a million gray rats
Lu Hsà n: Ballads among bushes of bayonets, hungry dove amid crumbling walls
Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die
Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground
Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs'd be he that first invented war!
Josà Martà : Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
Edgar Lee Masters: "The honor of the flag must be upheld"
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace
H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence
Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere
William Vaughn Moody: Bullet's scream went wide of its mark to its homeland's heart
Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise
Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace
Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one
Kenzabur... ...'e: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another
Charles PÃ guy: Cursed be war, cursed of God
Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Plato: No true statesman looks only, or first of all, to external warfare
Plutarch: On war and its opponents
Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest
Alexander Pope: Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war
Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Romain Rolland: Message to America on the will to conquer the world
Romain Rolland: Where to rebuild the world after war?
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
Saint-Exupà ry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference
Sallust: Lust for dominion the reason for war
George Santayana on war and militarism
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War's ruthless crew never dawn
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO's hands
Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw's Common Sense About the War
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission"at sword's point
Victor Domingo Silva: Cain, the fratricide
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars
Wole Soyinka: Civilian and Soldier
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Tacitus: The robbery, slaughter and plunder that empire calls peace
Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
Thucydides: Admonitions against war
Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Leo Tolstoy: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne
Paul Valà ry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission
CÃ sar Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death
Ã"degreesmile Verhaeren: I hold war in execration; ashamed to be butchers of their fellows
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
Xenophon: Socrates' war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues
Edward Young: Draw the murd'ring sword to give mankind a single lord
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars
Ã"degreesmile Zola: One sole city of peace and truth and justice
Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
