A Quote by Ronald Reagan

People do not make wars; governments do.

Ronald Reagan

Quote Topics

Governments Make People Wars

Quote Author

Ronald Reagan
American - President
February 6, 1911 - June 5, 2004

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.

Arundhati Roy

Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old.

Lewis H. Lapham

People don't start wars, governments do.

Ronald Reagan

All interstate wars intensify aggression – maximize it … some wars are even more unjust than others. In other words, all government wars are unjust, although some governments have less unjust claims.

Murray Rothbard

Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.

Noreena Hertz

Writers can't write as fast as governments make wars; because to write demands thinking.

Bertolt Brecht

If governments were kind, they'd realize that conficts are resolved and wars prevented not by armies but by ordinary people.

Scilla Elworthy

And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.

Robert Anton Wilson

As a general rule, governments are unlimited in their powers. All free governments, perhaps all other governments, are entitled in some shape or other to make laws and to repeal or amend them.

Samuel Freeman Miller

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

Calvin Coolidge

I am sick of war. Every woman of my generation is sick of war. Fifty years of war. Wars rumored, wars beginning, wars fought, wars ending, wars paid for, wars endured.

Josephine Winslow Johnson

We have a war on women, race wars. Income wars, age wars, religious wars, anything you can imagine. A house divided against itself cannot stand it. And it's going to be up to us, to people, to begin the focus on the positive things, on the things that we have in common and stop listening to those who are stoking the fires of division.

Benjamin Carson

Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both.

Mark Helprin

I used to be a computer engineer, and I can make really good code, and we can make systems that work really well, and we can make the application a great experience, but when you have to translate bits to atoms, you need folks who are used to working with city governments, with state governments, and so I like to say we're in a political campaign.

Travis Kalanick

Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.