The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

The true credit for our safety and security goes to our men and women who are serving in places like Iraq and Afghanistan in the global war on terrorism.

I know all's fair in love and war but when you go off and try to be by yourself and it ends up on the front page of the press it's frightening, knowing your life is under such scrutiny.

Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized men.

No military timetable should compel war when a successful outcome, namely a disarmed Iraq may be feasible without war, for example by allowing more time to the UN inspectors.

The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War.

There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.

It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

I may be wrong in that, but not I think in putting the questions. In our modern democracy the government needs not a unanimous but a general support for war before it orders our forces to fight.

But it cannot follow that because weapons and troops are now being deployed we are bound to go to war.

We're fighting an enemy that is far different than any we have got before. It's a nontraditional kind of war, and I think we need to step back, recalibrate how we go about protecting our borders and protecting our people, and resetting our position in the world.

So you're quite right that when... as the Cold War grew and expanded out of Europe, we ourselves had to take refuge behind the shield of the Monroe Doctrine.