Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Irish writers on peace and war
George Farquhar: What induced you to turn soldier?
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: War and its servile press
Frank Harris: Soulless selfishness of war; Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness greatest danger to Humanity
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against 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
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.
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.
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
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Oscar Wilde: Antidote to war
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace
Source