Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging upon a cross of iron.... [We] aspire to this: the lifting, from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and fears - so that they may find before them a golden age of freedom and of peace.
— "The Chance for Peace," April 1953
Expired: 2007