Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
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Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death
Stephen Vincent Benét: The dead march from the last to the next blind war
Ambrose Bierce: Warlike America
Ambrose Bierce: Killed At Resaca
Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Robert Bly: War, writers and government money
Randolph Bourne: Selections on war
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
Randolph Bourne: War and the State
Randolph Bourne: Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it
Randolph Bourne: Conscience and Intelligence in War
Randolph Bourne: Twilight of Idols
Randolph Bourne: Below the Battle
Louis Bromfield: NATO, Permanent War Panic and America’s Messiah Complex
William Cullen Bryant: Christmas 1875
William Cullen Bryant: Emblem of the peace that yet shall be, noise of war shall cease from sea to sea
Stephen Crane: There was crimson clash of war
Stephen Crane: War Is Kind
John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers
John Dos Passos on Randolph Bourne: War is the health of the state
Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket
W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts
William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
William Faulkner: To militarists, all civilians, even their own, are alien intruders
Frank Harris: Soulless selfishness of war; Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness greatest danger to Humanity
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium
Ernest Hemingway: Selections on war
Ernest Hemingway: All armies are the same
Ernest Hemingway: Beaten to start with, beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army
Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war
Ernest Hemingway: “Down with the officers. Viva la Pace!”
Ernest Hemingway: “If everybody would not attack the war would be over”
Ernest Hemingway: “It doesn’t finish. There is no finish to a war.”
Ernest Hemingway: Nothing sacred about war’s stockyards
Ernest Hemingway: Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever.
Ernest Hemingway: There are people who would make war, there are other people who would not make war
Ernest Hemingway: Who wins wars?
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace
Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870
William Dean Howells: Editha
William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War
Henry James: Beguiled into thinking war, worst horror that attends the life of nations, could not recur
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
William James: The Philippine Tangle
Sidney Lanier: Death in Eden
Sidney Lanier: War by other means
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here
Jack London: War
James Russell Lowell on Lamartine: Highest duty of man, to summon peace when vulture of war smells blood
Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace
H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men
William Vaughn Moody: Bullet’s scream went wide of its mark to its homeland’s heart
Eugene O’Neill: The hell that follows war
Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest
Edwin Arlington Robinson: Though your very flesh and blood the Eagle eats and drinks, you’ll praise him for the best of birds
Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise
Carl Sandburg: Ready to Kill
Carl Sandburg: What it costs to move two buttons one inch on the war map
George Santayana on war and militarism
Upton Sinclair: How wars start, how they can be prevented
Henry David Thoreau: Taxes enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood
Mark Twain: Selections on war
Mark Twain: Grotesque self-deception of war
Mark Twain: The War Prayer
Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Mark Twain: Only dead men dare tell the whole truth about war
Mark Twain: Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War
Mark Twain: An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war
Mark Twain on Western military threat to China: I am a Boxer
Thorstein Veblen: Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought
John Greenleaf Whittier: Disarmament
John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels
John Greenleaf Whittier: Nobler than the sword’s shall be the sickle’s accolade
Thomas Wolfe: Santimony and cant of war
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