Thomas Carlyle Quotes About War

Quotes about: War

• War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Peace, Military, War

  Attributed to Thomas Carlyle in "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty", essay by Emma Goldman, chapter five of Anarchism and Other Essays, 1911.

• I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Wisdom, War, Believe

• We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Law, Competition

  Thomas Carlyle (1843). “Past and Present”, p.87

• Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Soldier, Crow

  Thomas Carlyle (1908). “Sartor Resartus and Essays on Burns and Scott”

• Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Kings, War, Heaven

  "Sartor Resartus: The Historian".

• Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Party, History

  Thomas Carlyle (2002). “The Life of Oliver Cromwell: With a Selection from His Letters and Speeches”, p.166, The Minerva Group, Inc.

• War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Peace, War, Fighting

  "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" by Emma Goldman, chapter five of Anarchism and Other Essays, 1911.

• We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Sea, Rude

  1829 Signs of the Times.

• And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Light, Ships

• Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Men, Technology

  Thomas Carlyle, G. B. Tennyson (1984). “Carlyle Reader”, p.356, CUP Archive

• A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill.

  Thomas Carlyle

  War, Battle, Verbs

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