I believe that God wants me to be president.
~ George W. Bush

I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany.
~ Hitler – Berlin March, 1936

God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.
~ George W. Bush

If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us.
~ Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg, 3 Oct. 1937

Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.
~ George W. Bush

Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe!
~ Hitler – Nuremberg, Sept. 13, 1936.

One of the great attractions to patriotism, it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of a nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat while feeling we’re profoundly virtuous.  ~ Aldous Huxley

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.  ~ W. R. Inge

Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone and as irrational as a headless hen.  ~ Ambrose Bierce

Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched.  ~ Guy de Maupassant

Patriotism is a menace to liberty.  ~ Emma Goldman

Torture: If the Americans are doing it, and they’re not accountable, then who’s going to come to our rescue?   ~Moazzam Begg, Detainee #558 in Guantanamo Bay.

War is Sin

“The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight. …”     Read more here

from “War is Sin”, a Chris Hedges column at Truthdig

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out… and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel…. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” – with his mouth. ~ Mark Twain

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country. ~ Bertrand Russell, attributed

I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. ~ George McGovern