STOP NATO: Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Stop NATO Editor Rick Rozoff has put together a compendium of antiwar essays, poems and literary excerpts.
Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans
Aeschylus: Ares, father of tears, mows the field of man
Aesop: The lies of lupine liberators
Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games
Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh
Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession
Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse
Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors
W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Alexander Blok: The kite, the mother and endless war
Boethius: Provoking death’s destined day by waging unjust and cruel wars
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
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
Karel Čapek: The War with the Newts
Ernesto Cardenal: They speak of peace and secretly prepare for war
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man
Cervantes: Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony
Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war
Homo homini lupus: William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man
Rubén Darío: You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes
John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again
John Donne: War and misery are one thing
John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers
1862: Dostoevsky on the new world order
Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket
W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace
Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts
Paul Éluard: True law of men despite the misery and war
Erasmus: The Complaint of Peace
Euripides: The crown of War, the crown of Woe
William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
Fénelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man
Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
Ivan Franko: Even the dove has the blood of men on its snowy white wings
John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare
Rasul Gamzatov: For women war is never over
Gabriel García Márquez: Five wars and seventeen military coups
André Gide: Transformation of a war supporter
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Maxim Gorky on Romain Rolland, war and humanism
Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism
Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next
Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war
Jorge Guillén: The monsters have passed over
Nicolás Guillén: Come, dove, come tell me the tale of your woe
Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war
José-Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring
Miguel Hernández: Wretched Wars
Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace
Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace
Alexander Herzen: War and “international law”
Hesiod: Lamentable works of Ares lead to dank house of Hades
Nazim Hikmet: Sad kind of freedom, free to be an American air base
Friedrich Hölderlin: Celebration of Peace
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace
William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War
Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats
Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen
Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen
Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war
Avetik Issahakian: Eternal fabricators of war, erecting pyramids with a myriad skulls
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
Attila József: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win
Juvenal: Mighty warriors and their tombs are circumscribed by Fate
Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace
Nikos Kazantzakis: Francis of Assisi
Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind
La Bruyère on the lust for war
La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?
Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Lamartine: The republic of peace
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Stephen Leacock: The war mania of middle age and embonpoint
Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here
Livy: On the political utility of starting unprovoked wars
Federico García Lorca: War goes crying with a million gray rats
Lu Hsün: Ballads among bushes of bayonets, hungry dove amid crumbling walls
Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die
Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground
Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
José Martí: Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”
Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace
H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere
Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise
Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace
Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one
Kenzaburō Ōe: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another
Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God
Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Plutarch: On war and its opponents
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
George Santayana on war and militarism
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands
Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission…at sword’s point
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
Thucydides: Admonitions against war
Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne
Paul Valéry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission
César Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
Xenophon: Socrates’ war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues
Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord
Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria