Vera Brittain

“War is a crime against humanity. I am a pacifist and I will not support any war.”

“I have never been able to understand why it should be considered more moral to kill a man in a uniform than a man in a civilian suit.”

“I have always been a pacifist, and I have always been a feminist. They are two sides of the same coin.”

“I knew, by the nauseating experience of the Great War, that all wars are detestable.”

“I had discovered that there was a new world of ideas, a new world of causes, a new world of possibilities.”

“There is no life without friendship.”

“History, I believe, furnishes examples of civilizations that have decayed, but not of civilizations that have been brought to a stand-still.”

“From the first I was clamorous for the best of everything.”

“But the war had taught me that the dead are not left to rest in peace, and that the living are not left to live in peace.”

“That is the tragedy of losing a friend. It is not so much that they are gone, but that we are left behind.”

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's subordination.”

“I am a feminist because I despise being a parasite.”

“Politics are not my concern... they are my religion.”