150 anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Compiled and edited 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
Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh
Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse
Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
Karel Ä'apek: The War with the Newts
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man
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
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
Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War's Winnowing Basket
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?
Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
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
Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead 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
William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War
Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats
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
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
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
Selma Lagerlà f: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
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
Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die
Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole
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
Josà Martà : Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
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
Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere
Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise
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
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Plutarch: On war and its opponents
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
George Santayana on war and militarism
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO's hands
Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw's Common Sense About the War
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war
Thucydides: Admonitions against war
Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
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
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
Xenophon: Socrates' war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues
Edward Young: Draw the murd'ring sword to give mankind a single lord
