Eric Groves: The Anti-War Quote Book
Groves, Eric. The Anti-War Quote Book (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2008)
Eric Groves has put together a nice little book, featuring anti-war writings from Homer to the present and discussing the cost of war over the full course of human history. I appreciate the varied typography of the quotations and the overall design of the book, along with some photographs and several posters from Anti-War Posters, but the distressed/grunge look doesn't feel appropriate for some quotations.
Groves adequately identifies the quote's authors (name, years of birth and death, and brief description of their place in history), but managed to nonetheless trigger my pet peeve: He omits dates and published sources for the quotes themselves. Is it really so difficult to source a quote? Even something as brief as the book's--or speech's--title and year would be better than nothing. Particularly for authors whose lives spanned much of the twentieth century--such as Bertrand Russell--it would be helpful to know whether a particular quote was made in reference to a particular conflict, or to war in the abstract.
After finishing the book, I returned to Groves' words from the introduction:
"We cannot afford war any more.The costs are too enormous. History's greatest philosophers, educators, politicians, scientists, artists, clergy, and soldiers have argued this point for more than four thousand years.
Will we listen?" (p. 7)
Sadly, after reading the breadth of his selected words from some of the brightest lights of civilization, one is tempted to conclude that we--or, at least, our governments--will not listen. It is to the optimists that we must turn, then, to alleviate our despair at our species' sporadic inhumanity toward each other. Thus, my Quote of the Day is from Anne Frank:
"I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." (p. 151)