Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation (1814)

A useless war is the greatest offence that a government today can commit. It destroys every social guarantee without compensation; it jeopardizes every form of liberty; it injures every interest; it upsets every security; it weighs upon every fortune. It combines and legitimizes every kind of intemal and external tyranny. It introduces into judicial fonns a hastiness destructive both of their sanctity and of their purpose. It tends to represent all the men whom the agents of authority view with hostility as accomplices of the foreign enemy. It corrupts the rising generations; it divides the people into two parts, one of which despises the other and passes readily from contempt to injustice. It prepares future destructions by means of the past ones and purchases with the evils of the present the evils that are to come.

These are truths that cannot be repeated too often, since political authority, in its haughty disdain, treats them as paradoxes and despises them as mere commonplaces.