Tao Te Ching
War
The situation in North Korea now is a good example of McLuhan’s saying that “every new technology requires a new war.” New technology enables small, weak, and backward countries to leapfrog the steps advanced and powerful countries have taken, challenge the world order, and often conquer the previously more advanced nation. Examples include the stirrup invented c. 1000 BCE enabling the Xianbei “barbarians” to overrun the much more powerful China, the modern Chinese and Indians to bypass landline phones and directly compete with the much more “advanced” Western countries; and the longbow catapulting the English over the until then dominating French. Other technologies that have helped humanity in many ways but also launched or expanded numerous wars include the compass, the telescope, the printing press, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the computer. Benjamin Franklin’s attitude toward his inventions, his refusal to patent them and willingness to share with the world rather than hold on to for personal or national advantage; this attitude – if it becomes widespread - may be the turning point in finally ending the wars that have plagued humanity for so long.
Quotes (135)
“war is always a dangerous thing and brings with it destruction and devastation. Therefore it should not be resorted to rashly but, like a poisonous drug, should be used only as a last resort”
“Lavinia: ‘Why must there be war?... The horrible list of carnage they were making ready for… Why? What was it for? For a pet deer? For a girl? What good would that do?’
Turnus: ‘Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.’”
“The nature of weapons is to turn against their holder... Great conquerors are really great criminals.”
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
“It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
“When Homer said that he wished war might disappear from the lives of gods and men, he forgot that without opposition all things would cease to exist.”
“Nobody should be mad enough to choose war when there is peace. During times of peace, sons bury their fathers but in war fathers bury their sons.”
“Hope is man's curse... whenever a city has to vote on a question of war, not man ever takes his own death into account but shifts this misfortune to his neighbor”
“Educated men condemn murders and call them wrong but do not realize that a war of aggression against another country is wrong praising it and giving it their support… therefore it is clear they do not know the difference between right and wrong.”
“Trees, though they are cut and lopped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again.”
“'Politicians and generals who always want to extend their territories and fill their treasuries are called, 'Robbers of the People and should suffer the highest punishments.”
“Abandon your plan… respond to the demands of inner truth… and war will end by itself!”
“Cause the savage works of war to be lulled to rest vanquished by the never-healing wound of love”
“He who takes up the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that evil can be overcome by evil, or violence by violence?”
“Mortals go to war so that they can inherit dust, their vision distorted by the lie that they value which is nothing.”
“Dogs own space and cats own time. Kings travel from place to place like a cat but want to own those places like a dog. It's why there are wars.”
“Isn't it clear that weapons are the tools of misery? The great sages never waited until the need for such things arose.”
“The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean, and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended... blue is the smoke of war, white the bones of men.”
“Nothing results in greater droughts, plagues, or famines than the scourge of warfare. A good general wins only when he has no choice, then stops. He dares not take anything by force.”
“When ordinary officials and the common people have no fear, punishment occurs. When ministers and high officials have no fear, banishment occurs. When princes and kings have no fear, warfare occurs.”
“Now there was fought a battle such as men have not seen the like. And the earth was covered with steel, and arrows fell from the clouds like hail, and the ground was torn with hoofs, and blood flowed like water upon the plains. And the dead lay around in masses, and the feet of the horses could not stir because of them.”
“to the prizes of victory in war I preferred the battle of minds in disputation.”
“When the ruler possesses the Tao, soldiers become farmers. When the ruler does not possess the Tao, farmers become soldiers.”
“A prince should have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else to study than the art of war, its rules and discipline.”
“There is nothing more inglorious than that glory that is gained by war.”
“Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?”
“When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.
A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.”
“Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honorable of all others; because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species—who have never offended him,—as possibly he can.”
“There can be no greater Hypocrisy than for us as a People, to refuse to bear Arms and yet purchase Slaves at a very great Price, thereby justifying their selling of them, and the War, by which they were or are obtained;”
“War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice.”
“If religion no longer gives birth to civil wars, it is to philosophy alone that we are indebted... Without philosophy, we would be little above the animals.”
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
“There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war...This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle.”
“With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war; if not of open war, then at least ever ready to break out.”
“War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice… The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war”
“The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on a single point and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.”
“War is the stateman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.”
“The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist, because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.”
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”
“Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War… He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.”
“There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one--on the part of the instigator of the war… Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked… and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that comes to nations as well as individuals from the ups and downs of politics”
“You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!”
“99 men out of 100 in a civilized countries are opposed to war. We recognize that life is short and the night cometh. Leave us alone!”
“War cannot be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed… Only the annihilation of distance in every respect will insure the permanency of friendly relations.”
“Government is founded on property, property is founded on conquest, and conquest is founded on Power.”
“Human rights and wrongs are not determined by Justice, but by Might. Disguise it as you may, the naked sword is still king-maker and king-breaker, as of yore. All other theories are lies and — lures.
”
“Religious fanaticism, unlimited competition, and war are the murderers of freedom. Though they win victories, we now know that they end in suicide.”
“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love... the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.”
“Only the dead have seen the end of war” 
“War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.”
“There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep.”
“Euripides saw war as completely evil and he wrote the greatest anti-war piece of literature there is, the Trojan Women, but from first to last, he never mounts the pulpit.”
“What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”
“In every important war since 1700, the more democratic side has been victorious.”
“We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.”
“Since we now know what a terrible evil war is, we must spare no effort to prevent its recurrence.”
“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought with but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
”
“that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed… and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriots – how passionately I hate them!... this bogey would have disappeared long ago had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests.”
“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed... I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”
“War is something of man’s own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.”
“The Second World War—the tempest which had already begun to drive down upon the earth. Millions of people trembled as they saw the oncoming hunger, slaughter, and madness. All the devils in men were awake and thirsting for blood.”
“insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory - if only in the blood - of a time when the test of survival (as now between states) was the ability to kill.”
“Was there ever, since Ashoka, a major war in which one nation admitted the superior justice of the enemy's cause? It is part of the average citizen's nature to make his God a particeps criminis in the wars of his country. And no superstate could solve the problem, for some of our greatest wars have been civil.”
“War is the Darwinism or natural selection of states, and not all our tears will wash it out of history until the people and governments of the world agree, or are forced, to yield theri sovereignties to some superstate; and then there will be revolutions and civil wars.”
“The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.”
“The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.”
“I want war. To me all means will be right. My motto is 'Destroy him by all and any means.' I am the one who will wage the war!”
“War in our time has become an anachronism. Whatever the case in the past, war in the future can serve no useful purpose.”
“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”
“A few men like war and enjoy it as a game. But most men and all women hate war. They will not fight with their whole hearts unless they are set aflame. And the torch is always the same words... "All persons held as slaves... are and henceforward shall be free.”
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are over consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse.”
“The anarchy of competing sovereign states must lead to war sooner or later. Therefore we must have law, enforced by a world organization attained through world co-operation and community.”
“We know that there is no defense against the most destructive of modern weapons. Both the victor and the defeated will lose the next war. All the factors that formerly protected this country—geographical isolation, industrial strength, and military power—are now obsolete.”
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent... the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”
“I cared more about the fundamental way of thinking that causes war. This is why I didn’t like the nationalists in Japan. Their view was very one-sided and unrealistic… They created tremendous problems.”
“The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.”
“One can clearly see here that Buddhism is strongly opposed to any kind of war, when it lays down that trade in arms and lethal weapons is an evil and unjust means of livelihood.”
“War is the principle motivational force for the development of science at every level... all the significant discoveries about the natural world have been inspired by the real or imaginary military necessities of their epochs... war has always provided the basic incentive.”
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
“There are no grounds anywhere, anytime for justifying war... War exists only in man's world and is alien to the rest of the biological kingdom; it does not belong to the natural world. War is an absurdity that arose from the human intellect.”
“If there is anything to learn from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure [and] only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.”
“If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure... they only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.”
“All human beings are at war with themselves... The war is between the way we think we should be and who we are... between wanting pleasure (or ease or success) and being with the truth that life doesn't care about our pleasure (or ease or success)... We are all caught in the feeling that we should be some other way.”
“We are at war with ourselves, with the environment, and with others. It is a matter of overcoming the old ways of thinking and the old premises of being, including our economic and political structures. The old competitive market economy and the old political parties, representing special selfish interests, will give way to a co-operative global community.”
“Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars.”
“How can you have a war on terrorism while war itself is terrorism! War itself is the enemy of the human race.”
“Society highly values its normal man… Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
“The doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.”
“It is by no means an accident that the only successful attempt of the American citizenry to force the ending of a foreign war occurred simultaneously with a wide revision of sexual attitudes.”
“Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.”
“If as Sun Tzu says, ‘Deception is the art of war,’ it follows that being genuine and authentic is the art of peace.”
“McLuhan’s comment that ‘every new technology requires a new war’ may help explain why we have so many new wars popping up all the time - not just wars with guns but cultural wars, race wars, gender wars, political meme wars, religious wars, social hierarchy wars, wars of philosophy…”
“Once you leave the womb, conservatives don’t care about you until you reach military age. Then you’re just what they’re looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.”
“Going beyond challenge is learning the art of war… when you do not produce another force of hatred, the opposing force collapses,”
“It is the war that is going on inside our own heads to which we have to call the truce.”
“We let ourselves be blinded by promises, reduce ourselves to a state of deaf and dumb, and accept without question the battlefield situation of fighting against something else.”
“Every foreign war now will traumatize children who will hate us 50 years from now”
“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too”
“Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting my friends.”
“Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs…
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.”
“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned... Everything is war.”
“Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out But in the realm of ideas, one can become idealistic.”
“During most of the history of nations and empires, war was the natural state of affairs, and peace a mere interlude between wars. Today war between countries is obsolescent, and war within countries is absent from five-sixths of the world. The proportion of people killed annually in wars is about a quarter of what it was in the mid-1980s, a sixth of what it was in the early 1970s, and a 16th of what it was in the early 1950s.”
“The mental machinery that drives modern wars—patriotic fervor, mass self-righteousness, contagious rage—have their deepest roots in... conflicts among coalitions of males for status.”
“Struck by the arrows of greed, we don’t see that it is our own desire for conveniences… that actually supports the wars that are devastating our world.”
“there's no actual reason to assume that war has always existed... it's almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs, and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other is such systematic yet indiscriminate ways.”
“Any fool can start a war, and once he's done so, even the wisest of men are helpless to stop it - especially if it's a nuclear war.”
“Large scale warfare isn’t a universal human characteristic. It was invented… then it spread like the plague”
“Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it... The problem is that the world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it... Even if war is catastrophic for everyone, no god and no law of nature protect us from human stupidity.”
“Human beings are great at starting wars. We are also reasonably capable of ending wars, given enough time. What we struggle with, is avoiding wars altogether... When ancient kingdoms came into contact with one another, no matter how many gifts were exchanged in the early days, wars of domination eventually resulted.”
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