Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: It is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms
Richard Aldington: Selections on war
Richard Aldington: All the decay and dead of battlefields entered his blood and seemed to poison him
Richard Aldington: The Blood of the Young Men
Richard Aldington: The criminal cant and rant of war
Richard Aldington: How can we atone for the lost millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of blood?
Richard Aldington: How well the premeditated mass murder of war is organized
Richard Aldington: It is so important to know how to kill
Richard Aldington: It was a war of missiles, murderous and soul-shaking explosives, like living in the graveyard of the world
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
Richard Aldington: Why so sentimental? Why all this fuss over a few million men killed and maimed?
Grant Allen: War and blood money
Edwin Arnold: Heaven’s love descending in that loveliest word, PEACE!
Edwin Arnold: My chariot shall not roll with bloody wheels till earth wears the red record of my name
W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain
Thomas Lovell Beddoes: War’s harvest
William Black: Better small farms, thriving and prosperous, than splendid ruins that tell of the fierceness of war
William Black: Military glory, the most mean, the most cruel and contemptible thing under the sun!
William Black: When Caesar’s legions turn on him
William Blake: Selections on war and peace
William Blake: Be withdrawn cloudy war, troops of warriors depart, nor around our peaceable city breathe
William Blake: Groaning among the happier dead
William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!
William Blake: O go not forth in Martyrdoms & Wars
William Blake: To peaceful arts shall envy bow
George Borrow: Prisoners of war: misery on one side, disgrace on the other
James Boswell: On War
James Boswell: Who profits by war?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul
Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North
Edward Bulwer Lytton: The heartless and miserable vanity from which arose wars neither useful nor honourable
Edward Bulwer Lytton: The sword, consecrating homicide and massacre with a hollow name
Byron: War cuts up not only branch, but root
Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought – and that was death
Byron: War, banquet for wolf and worm
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
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
G.K. Chesterton: In modern war defeat is complete defeat
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War and all its dread vicissitudes pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts
William Collins: Ode to Peace
Joseph Conrad: Selections on war
Joseph Conrad: Firing into a continent, a touch of insanity in the proceeding
Joseph Conrad: In modern war mankind cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war
Joseph Conrad: Moral cannibals feeding on each other’s misfortunes: ‘It’s a damned bad war, but it’s better than no war at all.’
Joseph Conrad: With earth soaked in blood, all men seek some formula of peace
Homo homini lupus: William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man
John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again
Daniel Defoe: Mammon and Mars, twin deities
Charles Dickens: Waging war to perpetuate slavery
Austin Dobson: Before Sedan
John Donne: War and misery are one thing
Edward Dyer: So that of war the very name may not be heard again
Havelock Ellis: War, a relapse from civilisation into barbarism, if not savagery
George Farquhar: What induced you to turn soldier?
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
E.M. Forster: The Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer.
E.M. Forster: Wars spurred on by persistent talk of war, amplified by the gutter press
John Galsworthy: Selections on war
John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare
John Galsworthy: Achieving perpetual peace by securing the annihilation of our common enemies
John Galsworthy: Friend becomes foe with war psychosis
John Galsworthy: Grandiloquent phrases are the very munitions of war
John Galsworthy: History, made up of wars and intrigues which have originated in the brains of public men
John Galsworthy: The monstrous injustice of conflating chauvinism with common drunkenness
John Galsworthy: No one who disagrees with me must say anything if we are to save the cause of freedom and humanity
John Galsworthy: On the drawbacks of uttering pro-war cant
John Galsworthy: On the embarrassing consequences of bellicose pontification
John Galsworthy: Only a helpless or wicked God would allow the slaughter of millions
John Galsworthy: The procreative demands of war
John Galsworthy: The pure essence of humanitarian warfare sentiments
John Galsworthy: War moves mankind towards the manly and unforgiving vigour of the tiger and the rat
John Galsworthy: “The war! The cursed war!”
John Galsworthy: War, where Christ is daily crucified a million times over
David Garnett: Criminal to welcome war
David Garnett: War is the worst of the epidemic diseases which afflict mankind
George Gissing: Selections on war
George Gissing: Culpable fatalism: war is assured by perpetual prophecies of statesmen and journalists
George Gissing: The imposition of military servitude
George Gissing: Letter to a son killed in war: War is a horrible thing that ought to be left to savages
George Gissing: Lord of Slaughter commands curse of universal soldiering
George Gissing: War turns science into enemy of man
George Gissing: When the next great war comes, newspapers will be the chief cause of it
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Oliver Goldsmith: Selections on war
Oliver Goldsmith: A thousand hecatombs for mere trumperies. Imperial contest that no honest man can wish either side wins.
Oliver Goldsmith on war: Hundreds of thousands killed without consequence
Oliver Goldsmith: I am an enemy to nothing in this good world but war
Oliver Goldsmith: To make one man happy is more truly great than having ten thousand captives groaning at the wheels of his chariot
Oliver Goldsmith: War and its servile press
Robert Graves: Selections on war
Robert Graves: Accommodations for a million men killed in war
Robert Graves: A certain cure for lust of blood
Robert Graves: Even its opponents don’t survive war
Robert Graves: The grim arithmetic of war
Robert Graves: Men at arms and men of letters, the birth of English pacifism in the First World War
Robert Graves: Military madness degenerating into savagery
Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next
Robert Graves: War follows its victims back home
Robert Graves: War should be a sport for men above forty-five only
Robert Graves: War’s path of death, decay and decomposition
Robert Graves: War’s ultimate victors, the rats
Robert Graves: When even war’s gallows humor fails
Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war
Graham Greene: He carried the war in his heart, infecting everything
Graham Greene: A hundred English Guernicas
Graham Greene: Letter On NATO Threat To Cuba
Graham Greene: None of us can hate any more – or love. You have to feel something to stop a war.
Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified
Thomas Hardy: Channel Firing
Frank Harris: Soulless selfishness of war; Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness greatest danger to Humanity
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace
Maurice Hewlett: In the Trenches
Maurice Hewlett: Who prayeth peace?
Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen
Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen
Aldous Huxley: Selections on war
Aldous Huxley: Absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by war
Aldous Huxley: All devote themselves methodically and scientifically to general massacre and wholesale destruction
Aldous Huxley: The first of the political causes of war is war itself
Aldous Huxley: How are we to get rid of war when we celebrate militarists?
Aldous Huxley: Imposition of permanent military servitude upon the masses
Aldous Huxley: Manufacturing of arms, an intrinsically abominable practice
Aldous Huxley: Nuclear weapons, establishing world domination for one’s gang
Aldous Huxley: One cannot be ruler of militaristic society without being militarist oneself
Aldous Huxley: Peace of the world frequently endangered in order that oil magnates might grow a little richer
Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war
Aldous Huxley: Science, technology harnessed to the chariot of war
Aldous Huxley: Scientific workers must take action against war
Aldous Huxley: Shifting people’s attention in world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit
Aldous Huxley: War is mass murder organized in cold blood
Aldous Huxley: War is not a law of nature, nor even of human nature
Aldous Huxley: War is now the affair of every man, woman and child in the community
Aldous Huxley: War shatters precarious crust of civilization, precipitates vast numbers of human beings into abyss of misery and frenzied diabolism
Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”
Soame Jenyns: One good-natured act more praises gain than armies overthrown, and thousands slain
Samuel Johnson: War is heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved
Samuel Johnson: War is the extremity of evil
Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
Charles Kingsley: Empire, a system of world-wide robbery, and church
Charles Kingsley: Tyrannising it luxuriously over all nations, she had sat upon the mystic beast
D. H. Lawrence: Selections on war
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil
D.H. Lawrence: In 1915 the world ended with the slaughter-machine of human devilishness
D.H. Lawrence: The price to pay at home for terrible, terrible war
D.H. Lawrence: War adds horror to horror, becomes horrible piratic affair, dirty sort of freebooting
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Charles Lever: The self-serving drunken oblivion of war
Samuel Lover: The demon of war casts his shadows before
Samuel Lover: The trumpet and the sword
Thomas Macaulay: Drive for transatlantic dominion leads to endless wars, empty treasuries
Thomas Macaulay: Loving war for its own sake
Thomas Macaulay: The self-perpetuating role of the army
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence
George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine
Thomas Moore: Famine comes to glean all that the sword had left unreap’d. A banquet, yet alive, for ravening vultures.
William Morris: Protecting the strong from the weak, selling each other weapons to kill their own countrymen
William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home
Alfred Noyes: Selections on war
Alfred Noyes: And the cost of war, they reckoned it In little disks of gold
Alfred Noyes: The Dawn of Peace
Alfred Noyes: The men he must kill for a little pay. And once he had sickened to watch them slaughter an ox.
Alfred Noyes: Out of the obscene seas of slaughter
Alfred Noyes: Scarecrows that once were men
Alfred Noyes: A shuddering lump of tattered wounds lifted up a mangled head and whined
Alfred Noyes: Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!
Alfred Noyes: They say that war’s a noble thing!
Alfred Noyes: War they tell me is a noble thing
Alfred Noyes: When they talked of war, they thought of sawdust, not of blood
Alfred Noyes: The Wine Press
Sean O’Casey: Battles of war changed for battles of peace
Sean O’Casey: The dead of wars past clasp their colder arms around the newer dead
Sean O’Casey: The Prince of Peace transformed into the god of war
Liam O’Flaherty: The foul horror of war
Liam O’Flaherty: Sounds from a dead world. Nothing but worms and rats feeding on death.
Wildred Owen: Selections on war
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Wilfred Owen: For torture of lying machinally shelled at the pleasure of this world’s Powers who’d run amok
Wilfred Owen: From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept
Wilfred Owen: Multitudinous murders they once witnessed
Wilfred Owen: 1914
Wilfred Owen: The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
Wilfred Owen: Pawing us who dealt them war and madness
Wildred Owen: Rushed in the body to enter hell and there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
Wilfred Owen: Soldier’s Dream
Wilfred Owen: The sons we offered might regret they died if we got nothing lasting in their stead
Wildred Owen: Strange meeting: I am the enemy you killed, my friend
Thomas Parnell: Lovely, lasting peace, appear!
Walter Pater: What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Deity of Slaughter.
Thomas Love Peacock: We spilt blood enough to swim in, we orphaned many children and widowed many women
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties
Herbert Read: The Happy Warrior
Charles Reade: To God? Rather to war and his sister and to the god of lies
Charles Reade: War is sweet to those who have never experienced it
Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump
Isaac Rosenberg: O! ancient crimson curse! On receiving news of the war
Isaac Rosenberg: Soldier: Twentieth Century
John Ruskin: Peace Song
Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
Siegfried Sassoon: Aftermath
Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man
Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph
Siegfried Sassoon: Atrocities
Siegfried Sassoon: Enemies
Siegfried Sassoon: The foul beast of war that bludgeons life
Siegfried Sassoon: Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded
Siegfried Sassoon: Repression of War Experience
Siegfried Sassoon: Their dreams that drip with murder, of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride
Siegfried Sassoon: To Any Dead Officer
Siegfried Sassoon: The Tombstone-Maker
Siegfried Sassoon: The unheroic dead who fed the guns, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones
Siegfried Sassoon: War, remorse and reconciliation
Siegfried Sassoon: We left our holes and looked above the wreckage of the earth
John Scott: I hate that drum’s discordant sound
Walter Scott: War’s cannibal priest, druid red from his human sacrifice
Shakespeare: So inured to war that mothers smile as their children are slain
George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war
George Bernard Shaw: The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors
George Bernard Shaw: Gadarene swine running violently into a hell of high explosives
George Bernard Shaw: Little Minds and Big Battles
George Bernard Shaw: The Long Arm of War
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War
George Bernard Shaw: Rabid war maniacs reversed the order of nature
George Bernard Shaw: Religion of ruthless competition inevitably leads to war
George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction
George Bernard Shaw: Soldiering is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak
George Bernard Shaw: War and frivolous exultation in death for its own sake
George Bernard Shaw: War and the sufferings of the sane
George Bernard Shaw: War Delirium
George Bernard Shaw: War, governments and munitions manufacturers
George Bernard Shaw: War, the Yahoo and the angry ape
George Bernard Shaw: The way of the soldier is the way of death
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Man fabricates the sword which stabs his peace
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Earth cleansed of quivers, spears and gorgon-headed shields
James Shirley: Some men with swords may reap the field and plant fresh laurels where they kill
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Tobias Smollett: War contractors fattened on the blood of the nation
C.P. Snow: Selections on war
C.P. Snow: As final product of scientific civilization, nuclear bomb is its ultimate indictment
C.P. Snow: Even if moral judgments are left out, it’s unthinkable to drop the bomb
C.P. Snow: Hiroshima, the most horrible single act so far performed
C.P. Snow: Hope it’s never possible to develop superbomb
C.P. Snow: Worse than Genghiz Khan. Has there ever been a weapon that someone did not want to let off?
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Robert Southey: Preparing the way for peace; militarism versus Christianity
Robert Southey: The Soldier’s Wife
Stephen Spender: Selections on war
Stephen Spender: Automata controlled by the mechanism of war, meaningless struggle between potential ashes to gain a world of ashes
Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war
Stephen Spender: Two Armies
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stephen Spender: The Woolfs in the 1930s: War the inevitable result of an arms race.
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Lytton Strachey: After the battle, who shall say that the corpses were the most unfortunate?
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Frank Swinnerton: Aerial bombardment, the most stupid and futile aspect of war
John Addington Symonds: Nation with nation, land with land unarmed shall live as comrades free
Alfred Tennyson: Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace
Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
Henry Vaughan: Let us ‘midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss
Rex Warner: These guns were sent to save civilisation
H.G. Wells: Selections on war
H.G. Wells: The abolition of war will be a new phase in the history of life
H.G. Wells: Armaments: Vile and dangerous industry in the human blood trade
H.G. Wells: Either man will put an end to air war or air war will put an end to mankind
H.G. Wells: For the predetermined losing side, modern wars an unspeakable business
H.G. Wells: Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs and his speech is blunt and plain
H.G. Wells: Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war.
H.G. Wells: Nearly everybody wants peace but nobody thinks out the arrangements needed
H.G. Wells: No more talk of honour and annexations, hegemonies and trade routes, but only Europe lamenting for her dead
H.G. Wells: None so detestable as the god of war
H.G. Wells: A number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives to great task of peace
H.G. Wells: The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny
H.G. Wells: A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide
H.G. Wells: Universal collapse logically follows world-wide war
H.G. Wells: War is a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the dead
H.G. Wells: War, road to complete extinction or to degradation beyond our present understanding
H.G. Wells: War will leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children
H.G. Wells: When war comes home
H.G. Wells: Why did humanity gape at the guns and do nothing? War as business
H.G. Wells: The world is weary of this bloodshed, weary of all this weeping
H.G. Wells: The young are the food of war
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
Oscar Wilde: Antidote to war
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace
Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord
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