“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
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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“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“Every day above earth is a good day.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary sourceMore quotes by Ernest Hemingway →
“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 Primary source“War is a matter not so much of arms as of money.”
— Thucydides Primary source“Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but falsehood.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source