Notes on the Next War (Primary source)
In Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter, published in Esquire in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offers a dark, reflective, and ironically humorous meditation on the looming threat of another global conflict—what would eventually become World War II. Writing between the two world wars, Hemingway draws on his own harrowing experiences in World War I to critique the glorification of war and to expose its brutal psychological and physical costs.
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“It removes the only possible check. No one man nor group of men incapable of fighting or exempt from fighting should in any way be given the power, no matter how gradually it is given them, to put this country or any country into war. The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
Ernest Hemingway
“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary sourceMore quotes by Ernest Hemingway →
“All successful men have agreed in one thing—they were causationists.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“The one thing in the world of value is the active soul.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source