There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Wikiquote’s Albert Camus page places this wording under Misattributed and reports an unsourced Camus credit in Brenda Wong’s Quotations from the Wayside (1999), in a slightly different wording. Independently read Scott H. Bennett’s chapter Army GI, Pacifist CO in Nonkilling History (2010), printed p. 76, which quotes Dietrich’s closely matching sentence and identifies its archival source in note 174 as Albert G. Dietrich to Sterling F. Mutz, 31 January 1943, AGD-NSBRO File. The letter itself and Wong’s book were not inspected. The 1943 date is the composition date of the documented letter, not proof of publication then or of a route into the 1999 book. No evidence was found here that Dietrich originated the exact modern compression, or that Wong obtained it from him. Camus’s works are not held in the atlas’s source corpus: no exhaustive full-text search of them is claimed. Research compared Wikiquote’s attribution history, its Talk page, and Bennett’s scholarly chapter; the original author of the precise shortened wording and the intervening transmission remain unresolved.

1. 31 January 1943Before it · credited to Albert G. DietrichDietrich writes the longer near-formulation in his conscientious-objector letter to Sterling F. Mutz; this is an earlier formulation, not a verified appearance of the precise modern shortened wording, and its transmission to that wording is unproved.There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.Albert G. Dietrich to Sterling F. Mutz, 31 January 1943, AGD-NSBRO File, quoted by Scott H. Bennett in Army GI, Pacifist CO, Nonkilling History (2010), Bennett, p. 76, note 174. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
2. 1999Credited to Albert CamusBrenda Wong’s Quotations from the Wayside credits a compressed version to Camus without a source, according to Wikiquote; the book was not seen here.Many things are worth dying for, but none worth killing for.Brenda Wong, Quotations from the Wayside (1999), as reported by Wikiquote, Albert Camus, Misattributed. Checked on another researcher’s citation, not seen first-hand. Source
3. 2010Spread · credited to Albert G. DietrichBennett republishes the longer Dietrich sentence in his historical chapter, with an archival citation identifying the 1943 letter.Scott H. Bennett, Army GI, Pacifist CO, in Antony Adolf (ed.), Nonkilling History: Shaping Policy with Lessons from the Past (Center for Global Nonkilling, 2010), p. 76 and note 174. Checked in the text of a page scan, not the image. Source

The short saying circulates under Camus’s name. A longer, closely matching sentence is documented in Albert G. Dietrich’s 31 January 1943 letter to Sterling F. Mutz during his effort to obtain conscientious-objector status in the United States. Historian Scott H. Bennett quotes the sentence in his account of Dietrich’s religious and moral opposition to participating in killing.

A conviction may warrant risking one’s own life without warranting taking somebody else’s life.

Crediting the aphorism to Camus turns it into documentary evidence of his position on killing. The trace instead leads to an American conscientious objector, and the transmission from his letter to the modern short form remains unproved.

Death, Morality, Conscience, Wisdom, War

• Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. (misattributed) Albert Einstein
• The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. (not found) Mahatma Gandhi
• The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. (not found) Aristotle
• We must elect World Peace or World Destruction. Bernard Baruch
• The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. (not found) Fyodor Dostoevsky

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Camus#Misattributed
• nonkilling.org/pdf/nkhistory.pdf

“There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.” Attributed to Albert Camus. No. Not a sourced Camus quotation. A closely matching sentence is documented in Albert G. Dietrich’s 1943 letter; how it became the short saying credited to Camus is unresolved. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/causes-worth-dying-for-but-none-worth-killing-for/ (checked 29 October 2026).

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