G B Shaw on War

To nature, the life of an empire is no more than the life of a swarm of bees, and a thousand years are of lesser count than half an hour to you and me. Now the moral of that is that we must not depend on any sort of divine providence to put a stop to war. Providence says, 'Kill one another my children, kill one another to your hearts content. There are plenty more where you came from.' Consequently, if we want the war to stop we must all become conscientious objectors.

I'm not forgetting the gratification that war gives to the instinct of pugnacity and admiration of courage that are so strong in women. In the old days when people lived in forests like gorillas or in caves like bears, a woman's life and that of her children depended on the courage and killing capacity of her mate. To this day, in Abyssinia, a Danakil woman will not marry a man until he proves that he has at least four homicides to his credit. In England, on the outbreak of war, civilised young women rush about handing white feathers to all young men who are not in uniform.

But our women must remember that courage and pugnacity are not much use against machine guns and poison gas. If you tell me to be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect, I can only say that I wish I could. That will be more polite than telling you to go to the zoo and advise the monkeys to become men and the cockatoos to become birds of paradise. The lesson we have to learn is that our dislike for certain persons or even for the whole human race does not give us any right to injure our fellow creatures, however odious they may be. As I see it, the social rule must be: live and let live. -George Bernard Shaw

You can hear this in the recent (Saturday 19 August 2006) Science Show episode.