During my lifetime greater and more spectacular progress has been made in the physical sciences than in many centuries that preceded it.

My chief concern about the way we’re going is that new technology, precision weapons technology, appears to be giving us a new moral alibi.

Our problem, then, so easy to state, so hard to solve, is how to bring about a creative peace and a security which will have a strong foundation.

What we want is to become masters in our own house.

Whatever it is that leads men to fight and suffer, to face mutilation and death, the motive is not now self-interest in any material sense.

Every state has not only the right but the duty to make adequate provision for its own defense in the way it thinks best, providing it does not do so at the expense of any...

Nationalism could almost be defined as intense national feeling for a country that does not yet exist, or for someone else’s country.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we’ve been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in...

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.

I am grateful for the opportunities I have been given to participate in that work as a representative of my country, Canada, whose people have, I think, shown their devotion to peace.

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one...

There are lots of countries around that have weapons of mass destruction. We can’t presumably attack them all.

All war aims for impunity.

I cannot think of anything more difficult than to say something which would be worthy of this impressive and, for me, memorable occasion, and of the ideals and purposes which inspired the Nobel Peace Award.

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

The scientific and technological discoveries that have made war so infinitely more terrible for us are part of the same process that has knit us all so much more closely together.

A great gulf, however, has been opened between man’s material advance and his social and moral progress, a gulf in which he may one day be lost if it is not closed or narrowed.

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

I have worked in a very close and cordial way with Norwegian representatives at many international meetings, and the pleasure I felt at those associations was equaled only by the profit I always secured from...

There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don’t yet have states. They’re inside someone else’s state and they want a state of their own.

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have...

And I have lived since – as you have – in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act...

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

There’s a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.

Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.

As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform.

I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

It is already difficult to realize that a mere twenty years ago poverty was taken almost for granted over most of the earth’s surface.

There’s a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.

Today the predatory state, or the predatory group of states, with power of total destruction, is no more to be tolerated than the predatory individual.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.

It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of...

There’s a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it’s all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that’s a problem.

True there has been more talk of peace since 1945 than, I should think, at any other time in history. At least we hear more and read more about it because man’s words, for good...

As for the promotion of peace congresses we have had our meetings and assemblies, but the promotion through them of the determined and effective will to peace displaying itself in action and policy remains to...

If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen? And the answer to that question is no, you don’t.

Nevertheless, defense by power as a first obligation on a state has to be considered in relation to things other than economics.

There’s intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter...

As to the first, I do not know that I have done very much myself to promote fraternity between nations but I do know that there can be no more important purpose for any man’s...

If you say that we’re going to intervene to stop ethnic cleansing but we’re only going to do it at 15,000 feet, you can’t actually do it.

No state, furthermore, unless it has aggressive military designs such as those which consumed Nazi leaders in the thirties, is likely to divert to defense any more of its resources and wealth and energy than...

We wanted this war and now we’ve got it, and I’m not sure that we know what to do with it.

We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction.

But while we all pray for peace, we do not always, as free citizens, support the policies that make for peace or reject those which do not. We want our own kind of peace, brought...

It’s good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.