Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best War Quotes from famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Jon Meacham, Bill Burr, Siegfried Sassoon, Duke of Wellington. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
2
World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
3
Rich people never go to war. You ask a college kid to go to war, and he’s like, ‘Umm, I’m taking this sociology class, and I think war is, like, really stupid, and my roommate’s, like, half Afghani, so it’s going to cause some static.’
4
I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
5
Next to a lost battle, nothing is so sad as a battle that has been won.
6
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
7
World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.
8
You could argue that war is always an irrational act, and yet many states enter into military conflict out of rational calculation or national interest or the stability or longevity of their regime.
9
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
10
If we had a hydrogen economy worldwide, every nation on earth could create its own energy source to support its economy, and the threat of war over diminishing resources would just evaporate.
11
As we speak, Iran has rolled back its nuclear program, shipped out its uranium stockpile, and the world has avoided another war.
12
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
13
If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.
14
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
15
In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.
16
If you want to go anywhere in modern war, in the air, on the sea, on the land, you must have command of the air.
17
I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.
18
Rock ‘n’ roll was two pegs below being a prisoner of war back then.
19
Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation’s history and the world’s future.
20
The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.
21
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
22
War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.
23
The stabilizing influence of the modern social welfare state emerged only after World War II, nearly 200 years on from the 18th-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
24
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
25
There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation.
26
And I’m a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That’s the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
27
The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.
28
There is no alternative to peace. There is no sense to go to war.
29
The best way to solve problems and to fight against war is through dialogue.
30
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
31
Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war.
32
From the outset of the war, the Canadian people have clearly shown that it is their desire to help in every way to make Canada’s war effort as effective as possible.
33
God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.
34
‘Pears like my heart go flutter, flutter, and then they may say, ‘Peace, Peace,’ as much as they likes – I know it’s goin’ to be war!
35
What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
36
The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.
37
My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself ‘the American’ at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.
38
The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory.
39
When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there’s part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.
40
The war we have to wage today has only one goal and that is to make the world safe for diversity.
41
All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.
42
There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.
43
As I approached my 18th birthday and prepared to enter military service in World War II, I was recommended to receive the Melchizedek Priesthood.
44
The real war will never get in the books.
45
A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.
46
Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.
47
War is like love; it always finds a way.
48
Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
49
In the beginning of the war, Southern women wanted their men to leave – in droves, and as quickly as possible. They were the Confederate Army’s most persuasive and effective recruitment officers, shaming anyone who shirked his duty to fight.
50
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!
51
She doesn’t understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.
52
Everyone, when there’s war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
53
There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.
54
History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
55
You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.
56
War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.
57
Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
58
Either war is obsolete, or men are.
59
It seems to me that after the second world war, Beckett finally realized he had something to write about.
60
The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else – men, guns, ammunition.
61
Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.
62
Football is like war. It’s about taking territory.
63
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.
64
The Gulf War is responsible for the huge and horrifying rise in Islamic terrorism.
65
This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.
66
War is not only a matter of equipment, artillery, group troops or air force; it is largely a matter of spirit, or morale.
67
Earthshaking fire from the center of the Earth will cause tremors around the New City. Two great rocks will war for a long time, then Arethusa will redden a new river.
68
War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.
69
To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.
70
What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?
71
There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.
72
One can go to war alone, but you can’t build peace alone.
73
Something is wanting, and something must be done, or we shall be involved in all the horror of failure, and civil war without a prospect of its termination.
74
Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we’re going to win.
75
‘Women’s’ war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.
76
The best compliment we ever got about the show was from a Korean veteran who was unable to talk about his war experience with his wife until ‘M*A*S*H.’ While watching the show, he was able to lean over to his wife and say, ‘See, honey, that’s the way it was.’
77
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
78
War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.
79
I do not want war. I am not seeking revenge, even though I can see before my eyes the great sacrifices made by the Ukrainian people. I am seeking peace and will achieve Ukraine’s unity.
80
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‘whiz kids’ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
81
World War II was the last government program that really worked.
82
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.
83
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
84
We are at war, if you will, in the cyber domain now, constantly battling countries, such as Russia or China, who are trying to do everything from steal our technology to influence our elections to put out disinformation about the United States.
85
One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you’d see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.
86
It is the function of the Navy to carry the war to the enemy so that it is not fought on U.S. soil.
87
Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.
88
With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.
89
As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.
90
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
91
The White House isn’t the place to learn how to deal with international crisis, the balance of power, war and peace, and the economic future of the next generation.
92
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?
93
Thus they have an idol that they petition for victory in war; another for success in their labors; and so for everything in which they seek or desire prosperity, they have their idols, which they honor and serve.
94
The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962.
95
What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
96
America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.
97
Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.
98
I have not yet begun to fight!
99
I’m trying to raise the awareness of the troops that, when they deploy and go to war, it’s not just them at war – it’s also their family. Their family is having to go through all the hardships and the stresses.
100
It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures… I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with ‘Once upon a time.’
101
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
102
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
103
It’s a war zone, my body, and one which has been through a great deal.
104
After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.
105
Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat.
106
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
107
I have entered the field to die, if need be, for this government, and never expect to return to peaceful pursuits until the object of this war of preservation has become a fact established.
108
Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.
109
The Sandinista government became consumed with fighting a war of survival. They were up against the biggest superpower in the world.
110
The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.
111
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.
112
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
113
War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.
114
Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.
115
There is only one principle of war and that’s this. Hit the other fellow, as quickly as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain’t lookin’.
116
War is the business of barbarians.
117
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
118
We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
119
War is failure of diplomacy.
120
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.
121
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
122
If we lose the war in the air we lose the war and we lose it quickly.
123
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
124
World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.
125
A bad peace is even worse than war.
126
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
127
My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.
128
War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.
129
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
130
The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.
131
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
132
If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.
133
More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars – yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.
134
If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.
135
We became convinced that, regardless of Stalin’s awful brutality and his reign of terror, he was a great war leader. Without Stalin, they never would have held.
136
The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
137
I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
138
Military action is, of course, sometimes necessary to maintain peace. Kosovo and World War II are good examples.
139
The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate… we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.
140
People always make war when they say they love peace.
141
To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.
142
I’ve said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were ‘German dogs.’ They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.
143
Ukraine and Israel have long-standing historical ties. Our nations have together experienced all the tragedies in recent history – the Holodomor and the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the totalitarian Soviet regime.
144
The accounting of the sacrifice is, more than anything else, the attitude toward war memorials in our time.
145
War is hell.
146
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
147
The final outcome of a war is often determined by the degree of initiative shown on each side.
148
If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
149
We were told by President Obama that in respect of international trade, we would have to get to the back of the queue – not a position that America normally requires the United Kingdom to be in when it comes to other matters, such as the Iraq War.
150
We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.
151
Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.
152
Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.
153
He was a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser, show me a hero and I’ll show you a corpse.
154
During the Cold War, the non-aligned movement tried to become a ‘third force’ in world politics, but failed because it was too large and unwieldy.
155
Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn’t have as many monuments to unveil.
156
No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war’s dislocation.
157
We don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.
158
From the neck up is where you win or lose the battle. It’s the art of war. You have to lock yourself in and strategise your mindset. That’s why boxers go to training camps: to shut down the noise and really zone in.
159
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They’ll bankrupt you. Don’t ask a general for advice on war, and don’t ask a broker for advice on money.
160
The first lesson is that you can’t lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can’t win a war if you haven’t.
161
The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.
162
That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.
163
Those who want peace should prepare for war and be strong.
164
My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.
165
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
166
War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.
167
A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars.
168
We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.
169
When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.
170
It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow… that are the aftermath of war.
171
We live in an age, in an era where there is so much negativity, there is so much violence in the world, there is so much unrest and people are at war, that I wanted to promote the word love and red signifies love.
172
Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.
173
On the last day of January 1915, in the second year of the Great War, down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into this world.
174
I’d been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.
175
Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
176
I find by my calculations, which are according to revealed inspiration, that the sword of death is now approaching us, in the shape of pestilence, war more horrible than has been known in three lifetimes, and famine.
177
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
178
If we are to have a war with America, we will have no hope of winning unless the U.S. fleet in Hawaiian waters can be destroyed.
179
War is the trade of Kings.
180
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.
181
Women don’t go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.
182
If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.
183
‘Turn to Stone’ was written about the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War and the protesting that was going on and all of that. It’s a song about frustration. Also, I attended Kent State.
184
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
185
The opposite of war is not peace, it’s creation.
186
The war we are fighting today against terrorism is a multifaceted fight. We have to use every tool in our toolkit to wage this war – diplomacy, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and of course, military power – and we are developing new tools as we go along.
187
There is a type of snobbish, pompous journalist who thinks that the only news that has any validity is war, famine, pestilence or politics. I don’t come from that school.
188
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
189
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
190
He belonged to that army known as invincible in peace, invisible in war.
191
It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.
192
Religion is interesting because it brings out the best and the worst in humanity. It can be a source of good deeds, whether it’s people from different spiritual backgrounds coming together to help other people in need after a crisis. But it’s also a cause for war and bloodshed.
193
War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.
194
If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
195
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
196
I always tell people, anger is like liquid. It’s fluid, it’s like water. You put it in a container and it takes the shape of that container. So many people you see in prison, unleashing war on their people, they are angry, and they take their anger and put it into a violent container.
197
I’m not ambitious. I don’t want to get anywhere, I don’t want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don’t want anything. I don’t want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.
198
Behind a smoke screen of high-profile female appointees and soothing slogans, George W. Bush is waging war on women.
199
My parents fled from North Korea during the Korean War because they despised the North Korean Communist regime. They fled to seek freedom and came to South Korea.
200
I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.
201
To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.
202
War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
203
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
204
We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon – no alternative.
205
Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He’s the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.
206
During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.
207
Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China – the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.
208
Laws are silent in time of war.
209
In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.
210
Our war cries opened the deaf ears of the almighty government and its accomplices.
211
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
212
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
213
We in the West think of peace as society’s default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms and resume their normal lives.
214
I’m against war with the United States. But I am an officer of the Imperial Navy and a subject of His Majesty the Emperor.
215
A nation’s ability to fight a modern war is as good as its technological ability.
216
The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of common man.
217
War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.
218
If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.
219
I have never before, in my long and eclectic career, been gifted with such an abundance of natural beauty as I experienced filming ‘War Horse’ on Dartmoor.
220
War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
221
When gasoline and rubber are rationed, electric power and transport facilities are becoming increasingly scarce, and manpower shortages are developing, it is difficult for people to understand their increased use for other than the most vital needs of war.
222
The history of mankind is a history of war.
223
God put me on this earth to bring souls back to the Kingdom of God. You don’t need to pray ten times a day – you just need hope. My music is going to stop war; it’s the healing music. I see myself in Brazil, in Syria, in Darfur, and places where they really need hope.
224
War itself is the enemy of the human race.
225
I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.
226
The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.
227
The United States never lost a war or won a conference.
228
When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
229
War is a contagion.
230
I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them.
231
God used me that day. Even though so much of my body was burned, my feet were not burned, and so I could run out and be there for that photo. It saved a lot of souls and brought an end to the war.
232
Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
233
Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.
234
Successive American presidents have turned a blind eye to piles of evidence that Saudi money is being used to foment holy war against America.
235
In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.
236
It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
237
I’ve always been at war with myself, for right or wrong.
238
I was in World War II; I cried when they took me in the Navy. That’s the last time I cried.
239
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write ‘War and Peace’ in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
240
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
241
War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.
242
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.
243
The Holocaust only emerged in American life after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day war against its Arab neighbours.
244
Isn’t it essential in any prelude to a war to be sure of your allies and be sure of your objectives?
245
All oppression creates a state of war.
246
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
247
A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own.
248
It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We’re reaching a time that we’ll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.
249
War is not cheap, but it’s the human cost that’s the highest.
250
Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.
251
The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.
252
A peaceful world requires collective measures for the prevention of war, international cooperation to solve economic and social problems, and respect for human rights.
253
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
254
I’m not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I’m going to say I’m opposed to war. But I’m also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.
255
We must fight for peace bravely as we fought in war.
256
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
257
The human voice: It’s the instrument we all play. It’s the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It’s the only one that can start a war or say ‘I love you.’ And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don’t listen to them.
258
I didn’t see conflict during the Vietnam War, but I did lose close friends.
259
The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.
260
The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!
261
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guess what was at the other side of the hill’.
262
Winning is overrated. The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.
263
It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.
264
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.
265
Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.
266
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
267
Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.
268
A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty.
269
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
270
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
271
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
272
Journalists typically don’t carry weapons, even in war zones, for fear of compromising their status as neutral observers. If you’re armed, the theory goes, other armed people will consider you a target.
273
The lessons Noam Chomsky sets out to teach us in ‘Toward a New Cold War’ are invaluable. The United States, like any other nations, can and does err, and often in a big way. But Chomsky cannot support at all his implicit diagnosis that America is ‘bad.’
274
It is not only the living who are killed in war.
275
What is not conservative about saying, ‘Don’t go to war unless we go to war properly with a full declaration of war and no other way?’
276
The men and women who served during the Vietnam War are often overlooked.
277
This union has been divided in like a civil war – brother against brother – sister against sister. And I’m pulling it together. We’ve already seen evidence of that in New York, in Pennsylvania, in California. The first thing is we have to get on the same page. We have to be united in one cause.
278
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
279
Nullification means insurrection and war; and the other states have a right to put it down.
280
It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I’m not naive, and I don’t romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.
281
Cuba never had advisors in Vietnam. The military there knew very well how to conduct their war.
282
It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
283
No one hates war like a soldier hates war.
284
I will not agree to go to war in the Donbass. I know there are a lot of hotheads, especially those who hold rallies and say, ‘Let’s go fight and win it all back!’ But at what price? What is the cost? It’s another story of lives and land. And I won’t do it.
285
In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflict stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering.
286
I ended the war a horse ahead.
287
If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.
288
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students’ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
289
War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.
290
I’m of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little… Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.
291
I was never convinced that war was the best system to bring democracy to the country.
292
What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I’m still struggling with it, 40 years later.
293
Unless a nation’s life faces peril, war is murder.
294
I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.
295
War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
296
One may know how to gain a victory, and know not how to use it.
297
War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
298
Too often, stories about Afghanistan center around the various wars, the opium trade, the war on terrorism. Precious little is said about the Afghan people themselves – their culture, their traditions, how they lived in their country and how they manage abroad as exiles.
299
The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts – we have learned only recently how close we were to war – but I knew enough to make me tremble.
300
War is just a racket… I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.
301
The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
302
No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.
303
The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.
304
All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.
305
Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
306
The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.
307
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
308
Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.
309
In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.
310
On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 A.M. that morning, Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack – as were the CIA and the rest of the world.
311
I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn’t there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope.
312
Satan has declared war on motherhood. He knows that those who rock the cradle can rock his earthly empire. And he knows that without righteous mothers loving and leading the next generation, the Kingdom of God will fail.
313
When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.
314
Winning the peace is harder than winning the war.
315
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
316
Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.
317
It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.
318
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
319
Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
320
Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
321
France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.
322
During practically all of my public life, I have been a sincere advocate of an agreement between the leading nations of the world to set up all the necessary international machinery that would bring about a practical abolition of war between civilized nations.
323
We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good… when trade stops, war comes.
324
I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
325
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
326
War has rules, mud wrestling has rules – politics has no rules.
327
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
328
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
329
For me, true beauty has nothing to do with wrinkles and everything to do with the fact that my maternal grandmother raised five children just after the war and remained a fighter throughout her life. True beauty is the slick of red lipstick my paternal grandmother would put on before going to church on Sunday.
330
We are unnecessarily wasting our precious resources in wars… if we must wage war, we have to do it on unemployment, disease, poverty, and backwardness.
331
I do not believe we will have a war with Iran.
332
The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.
333
I would trade 20 white babies for an Asian baby. If I’m ever rich, I want a closet full of Asian babies. And I’ll just pull them out whenever I’m feeling down, you know? All kinds. Korean ones. Chinese ones. Vietnamese – not so much. My dad was in the war, and I hold a grudge.
334
The key lesson of the 1930s is that appeasement leads directly to war.
335
War is a profane thing.
336
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
337
Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.
338
I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.
339
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
340
Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!
341
There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
342
I’m a writer. I don’t support any war. That’s my principle.
343
War is the science of destruction.
344
War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.
345
Let’s be under no illusions: There are attacks on, for example, transgender Americans from the Oval Office, picking on troops – people willing to lay down their lives for this country – not to mention teenagers in our high schools. So we’ve got to end the war on trans Americans.
346
If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.
347
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming – a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.
348
Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves.
349
I want a world without war, a world without insanity. I want to see people do well. I don’t even think it’s as much as what I want for myself. It’s more what I want for the people around me. That’s what I want.
350
The civil war which has so long prevailed between Spain and the Provinces in South America still continues, without any prospect of its speedy termination.
351
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
352
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
353
It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
354
Every gun that is made, 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.
355
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.
356
The military don’t start wars. Politicians start wars.
357
We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.
358
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
359
Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.
360
Madam C.J. Walker was born in 1867, two years after the civil war ended. She was a daughter of a slave. She had no formal education. Both her parents died by the time she was seven. Yet, by the time she died in 1919 at age 51, she was one of the most successful businesswomen America had ever seen.
361
Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?
362
The one question I would have for Donald Trump is inspired by his ‘Make America Great Again’ cap. I would ask him, ‘When was America great? When did America not have an economic depression or a war?’
363
Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.
364
I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.
365
War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.
366
So I would say God hates war, but God loves every soldier.
367
Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.
368
I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.
369
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.
370
In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
371
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.
372
There’s not going to be a World War III, because there is no one to have World War III with.
373
Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.
374
We make war that we may live in peace.
375
All I watch is war movies. The stories be touching… just to see what they go through on both sides of the fence.
376
We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.
377
Here’s how I think of my money – as soldiers – I send them out to war everyday. I want them to take prisoners and come home, so there’s more of them.
378
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
379
For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.
380
War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.
381
There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains) and Bush the Elder.
382
I like war.
383
When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it’s not something you want to remember or think about.
384
Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.
385
There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
386
I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.
387
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.
388
The most important thing we have to do first of all in a war with the U.S., I firmly believe, is to fiercely attack and destroy the U.S. main fleet at the outset of the war so that the morale of the U.S. Navy and her people goes down to such an extent that it cannot be recovered.
389
In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
390
I can testify to what UNICEF means to children because I was among those who received food and medical relief right after World War II.
391
After every war someone has to tidy up.
392
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
393
I am an enthusiastic European, and my first-hand experience of war and hatred has strengthened that conviction. I have seen how misguided unilateral nationalistic identities have brought destruction and death. I am, however, a world citizen, too.
394
War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it’s so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are ‘others’ whom we can legitimately make war upon.
395
Accursed be he that first invented war.
396
What they could do with ’round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.
397
Fighting a war on terrorism is like fighting against crime. We can never hope to eradicate crime, so we shouldn’t bother fighting it.
398
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
399
In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.
400
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
401
War is not the answer, because only love can conquer hate.
402
Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.
403
War is never a lasting solution for any problem.
404
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
405
Study and work and work and study will keep in active exercise both the physical and mental. These two, rightly conducted, will not war against each other.
406
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
407
In my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the government. The government will not use force unless force is used against it.
408
We cannot be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of the weapons of war.
409
In most communities it is illegal to cry ‘fire’ in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?
410
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.
411
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
412
The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
413
Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
414
That man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war.
415
In war there is no substitute for victory.
416
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
417
In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.
418
We owe our World War II veterans – and all our veterans – a debt we can never fully repay.
419
In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
420
Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.
421
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
422
From the moment this war began, there was, for this state, only one policy possible, neutrality.
423
It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.
424
The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.
425
Peace must be more than the absence of war.
426
In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda.
427
I want to wage war against illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, unfair competition, communitarianism, delinquency.
428
The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.
429
You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.
430
May the same Almighty Goodness banish the accursed monster, war, from all lands, with her hated associates, rapine and insatiable ambition!
431
The experience of being in the Army changed my whole life; I never believed that an organization such as ours could ever go to war, leave alone win it. It was, as Yeats remarked of the Easter Rising, ‘A terrible beauty.’
432
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
433
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
434
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
435
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
436
I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.
437
To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
438
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
439
We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment. Many things have been said about me which are wrong, and which white and black persons here, who stood by me through the war, can contradict.
440
Our soldiers fought in the Korean War to push back communism. As a result of their effort and the effort of our allies, South Korea is free today.
441
Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren’t any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification. You didn’t necessarily even hear what the fate of your loved ones had been. It was up to their comrades to write and inform you.
442
The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.
443
Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It’s not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it’s madness.
444
In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.
445
The ’60s are my favorite decade – with the Cold War, the women’s movement. And then there’s the music, the fashion, the clothes, the hair.
446
War is fear cloaked in courage.
447
My mom, Irmelin, taught me the value of life. Her own life was saved by my grandmother during World War II.
448
War is what happens when language fails.
449
I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government – the Kennedy administration at that time – into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen.
450
Business is a combination of war and sport.
451
We need only look to our Navajo Code Talkers during World War II to see the value that Native languages bring not only to their culture, but to the security of all Americans.
452
Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.
453
War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.
454
The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.
455
It’s an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That’s always been a tug of war for me.
456
Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.
457
From the point of the view of the nation’s power, it was obvious that while we were fighting the Sino-Japanese war, every effort was to be made to avoid adding to our enemies and opening additional fronts.
458
War is the ultimate tool of politics.
459
You can propose marriage naked or in handcuffs, but no one is going to agree to forsake all others for a man in shorts. You can’t declare war in shorts or deliver a eulogy in shorts.
460
Besides, we had a large debt, contracted at home and abroad in our War of Independence; therefore the great power of taxation was conferred upon this Government.
461
I have observed that baseball is not unlike a war, and when you come right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.
462
Terrorism has become the systematic weapon of a war that knows no borders or seldom has a face.
463
World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.
464
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
465
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
466
Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes… can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.
467
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
468
Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.
469
You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that’s based on religion.
470
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
471
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
472
As I was writing ‘The Shock Doctrine’, I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina.
473
While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.
474
Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.
475
I don’t think it’s too late for ‘The War of the Worlds’ to come true. I’m talking about it from the standpoint that which you need to have and own things – to breed, to think, to create – is going on everywhere, not just on this planet or in the space around it.
476
All the gods are dead except the god of war.
477
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
478
Capitalism is war; socialism is peace.
479
The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.
480
In many… cases, of course, the Arab Spring has brought about instability rather than greater stability. And rather than bringing about government that is more representative and more responsive to the people, you’re seeing, frankly, the opposite, or you’re seeing all-out war.
481
Growing up with my mother who grew up during World War II being half Filipina, half Okinawan, and literally running around the jungles in the Philippines escaping Japanese military chasing after them – I grew up with what they deem now as trauma, generational trauma.
482
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
483
I don’t know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.
484
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
485
War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.
486
Everything, everything in war is barbaric… But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.
487
Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
488
If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
489
I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.
490
I don’t believe in war as a solution to any kind of conflict, nor do I believe in heroism on the battlefield because I have never seen any.
491
I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
492
‘War Eagle’ is like ‘I love you.’
493
No more war! Never again war! If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.
494
The middle of ‘America’s Women’ is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.
495
Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.
496
A handful of men, inured to war, proceed to certain victory, while on the contrary, numerous armies of raw and undisciplined troops are but multitudes of men dragged to the slaughter.
497
After every major conflict – World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union – what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.
498
The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
499
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
500
Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war.
501
Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence.
502
I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go… It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, ‘Wait a second? Didn’t we just get through with that?’
503
This was not an act of terrorism, but it was an act of war.
504
Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.
505
What shall I say further? Shall I not stop short and leave to your imaginations to portray the tragic deeds of war? Is it not enough that I here leave it even to unexperience to fancy the hardships, the anxieties, the dangers, even of the best life of a soldier?
506
Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
507
For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business.
508
You can easily die racing to cover a bank robbery as you can in a war zone.
509
To win this war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.
510
War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.
511
Generally, the view that I’ve had on Twitter is if you’re on Twitter, you’re in, like, the meme – you’re in meme war land. If you’re on Twitter, you’re in the arena. And so, essentially, if you attack me, it is therefore OK for me to attack back.
512
It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.
513
A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It’s in your mind. We’re all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.
514
It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
515
There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.
516
I went to Vietnam during the Vietnam War to visit all the troops. We would fly into a hospital and serve mess to the guys, and we ate whatever they were eating. Then we slept there and flew out the next day to little bases where there were maybe 10 or 20 guys. Then we flew to another hospital.
517
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
518
My child, you are going to be a great king; do not imitate me in the taste I have had for building, or in that I have had for war; try, on the contrary, to be at peace with your neighbors.
519
War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.
520
In every war, there’s looting.
521
War is something of man’s own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.
522
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
523
War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.
524
War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.
525
Patriotism is an instant reaction that fades away when the war starts.
526
In defence of Madiba’s legacy, we will continue to wage a relentless war on corruption and mismanagement of the resources of our country.
527
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.
528
War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
529
I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.
530
I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost – and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.
531
I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace.
532
We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war.
533
A war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the beginning of a major catastrophe in the region, and it will reflect very strongly on the rest of the world. For sure, we will not allow any such thing.
534
Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.
535
After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.
536
We believe in peace in the settlement of all disputes through peaceful means, in the abolition of war, and, more particularly, nuclear war.
537
It’s the first war we’ve ever fought on the television screen and the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign.
538
‘Twenty One Pilots’ is a play by Arthur Miller, who also wrote ‘All My Sons.’ It’s about a guy who’s creating and developing parts for airplanes in war time, when it comes to his attention that some of these parts were faulty.
539
An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.
540
War is a blessing compared with national degradation.
541
The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again.
542
Sweat saves blood.
543
What a cruel thing war is… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.
544
The Berlin Wall wasn’t the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.
545
War settles nothing.
546
My dear Excellency! I have not gone to war to collect cheese and eggs, but for another purpose.
547
There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It’s mostly about random pointless death and misery.
548
The Cold War isn’t thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn’t sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.
549
I’ve been to war, and it’s not easy to kill. It’s bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.
550
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
551
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.
552
I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
553
Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.
554
Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.
555
I’ve always been at war with myself, for right or wrong. I don’t know how to explain it more. It’s universal. Some people are better at dealing with it, and they sleep with no pain – not pain, arguments. I’ve grown quite comfortable with being at war.
556
We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
557
I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
558
World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.
559
The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.
560
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
561
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult – to begin a war and to end it.
562
I guess if people couldn’t profit from war I don’t think there would be war.
563
War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
564
We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.
565
I will not play tug o’ war. I’d rather play hug o’ war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins.
566
There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war – nothing material or ideological – no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.
567
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
568
Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.
569
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
570
Remember, God provides the best camouflage several hours out of every 24.
571
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
572
War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.
573
We’ve waged war on work. We have collectively agreed, stupidly, that work is the enemy.
574
The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
575
War means fighting, and fighting means killing.
576
Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.
577
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
578
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.
579
Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
580
There was never a good war, or a bad peace.
581
The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.
582
The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
583
The War Powers Act requires presidents to seek the consent of the American people, through their representatives, before sending our troops into war. It is the responsibility of Congress to deliberate and consult with the executive branch before involving ourselves in a military conflict.
584
A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.
585
When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.
586
To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.
587
War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.
588
I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.
589
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
590
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.
591
War zones are dangerous, protests can be violent, also, natural disasters are difficult to cover, so there are going to be risks.
592
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
593
A siege is an act of war.
594
All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
595
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
596
Bad as was being shot by some of our own troops in the battle of the Wilderness, – that was an honest mistake, one of the accidents of war, – being shot at, since the war, by many officers, was worse.
597
The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.
598
The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.
599
When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.
600
War is big business. It’s a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.
601
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
602
In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.
603
I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it’s a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.
604
That most unfortunate war, which I deeply deplore.
605
Kashmiri people are fighting the war for freedom. And India cannot stop this freedom movement through atrocities, as Kashmir dispute is a problem of humanity, human rights, and freedom.
606
I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.
607
No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
608
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
609
He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
610
What I am going to tell you is this: Although it is commonly believed that the War on Terrorism is a noble effort to defend freedom, in reality, it has little to do with terrorism and even less to do with the defense of freedom.
611
Peace and not war is the father of all things.
612
The Patriot Act is essential to our continued success in the war on terror here at home.
613
We’ve killed a million Iraqis since the start of the Gulf war – mostly by blocking humanitarian aid.
614
One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.
615
I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.
616
When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.
617
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
618
When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
619
At the Imperial Conference on December 1, it was decided to make war against England and the United States.
620
I have my cousin’s jacket from when he was at war in Iraq. He never came home. It’s incredible to have something that is so personal but that I also feel relatively comfortable wearing.
621
Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.
622
Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.
623
My first direct encounter with the military was when I joined ROTC as a graduate student, although my father, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, can trace the military service in our family all the way back to the Revolutionary War.
624
Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it… You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.
625
War… is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.
626
What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.
627
Monarchs ought to put to death the authors and instigators of war, as their sworn enemies and as dangers to their states.
628
I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.
629
There are two problems for our species’ survival – nuclear war and environmental catastrophe – and we’re hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
630
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.
631
Don’t forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.
632
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
633
No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.
634
There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.
635
I’m not afraid to say I’m at war with the pigs.
636
Man becomes his most creative during war.
637
Hollywood never knew there was a Vietnam War until they made the movie.
638
War is the province of danger.
639
I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.
640
There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever… money, for instance, or war.
641
There’s nothing good that comes out of war. It’s simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don’t.
642
We are no longer demonstrators. We are not actors, we are now people committed to the proposition that if the government won’t stop the war, we will stop the government.
643
Our enemy is motivated by hatred and will not stop planning more plots against until they are ultimately defeated. Today was an important and necessary victory in the war, but there is a long road ahead. We must remain committed if we are to succeed and protect our liberty.
644
There are so many books out about Abraham Lincoln out now because it’s the bicentennial of his birth. I’ve known a lot about the Civil War, but I’m just getting more into it.
645
I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
646
The marshalling of those resources in order to obtain the maximum war effort for Australia, and a maximum degree of help and cooperation for Great Britain and the sister Dominions, is the primary objective of the new Department.
647
In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.
648
The lunacy continues and has every chance of becoming a way of life unless we stop it soon. Men are getting so used to wars that the psychiatric wing of the RAMC are planning how to break the news to the men when the war is over.
649
In war there is no prize for runner-up.
650
It takes a few to make war, but it takes a village and a nation to build peace.
