Simone Weil War Quotations

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

War is the supreme form of prestige.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics...

When war is waged, it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

Every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms...

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.

War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production.

If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.