A Quote by Lester B. Pearson

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.

Lester B. Pearson

Quote Author

Lester B. Pearson
Canadian - Politician
April 23, 1897 - December 27, 1972

Japan suffered terribly from the atomic bomb but never adopted a pose of moral superiority, implying: 'We would never have done it!' The Japanese know perfectly well they would have used it had they had it. They accept the idea that war is war; they give no quarter and accept none. Total war, they recognize, knows no Queensberry Rules. If you develop a devastating new weapon during a total war, you use it; you do not put it into the War Museum.

George Mikes

Very few people chose war. They chose selfishness and the result was war. Each of us, individually and nationally, must choose: total love or total war.

David Dellinger

Arabs and their allies are conducting a total war against Israel. A total war means a war of lies. The PA [Palestinian Authority] promotes lies; lying in Islam is permitted.

Manfred Gerstenfeld

No war can end war except a total war which leaves no human creature on earth. Each war creates the causes of war: hate, desire for revenge and have-nots, desperate with need.

Zelda Popkin

Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?

Joseph Goebbels

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Jean-Paul Sartre

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.

Salman Rushdie

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total depression.

Peter Drucker

Our vision of war is probably too influenced by the biggest one of all, World War II, where the forces of evil were so unambiguous and so relentless that there was no choice but to commit to total war and to demand unconditional surrender. Seldom, though, is it quite that clear cut.

David Horsey

Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn't take long for it to rise again as a much more malignant threat. The end of World War II was not to be a compromise; it was to come about from the total annihilation of the enemies' ability and will to make war.

Monica Crowley

after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

Rachel Maddow

This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we dont try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

John Pilger

One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh - a process taking (say) 500 years.

Bertrand Russell

Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they adduce. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive war. Although this suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war.