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No tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves.
-American Indian Proverb
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The best armor is to keep out of range.
-Italian Proverb
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When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
-African Proverb
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You've never lived until you've almost died, for those who fought for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know.
-Anon., from Viet Nam, 1968
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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
-Proverb
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The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.
-Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow
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We often give our enemies the means to our own destruction.
-Aesop
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Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
-Martin Amis
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O can't you see, brother -- Death's a congested road for fighters now, and hero a cheap label.
-C. D. Andrews
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The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
-Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, On Violence., 1972
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If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: How do you want the world to be in fifty years? and What do you want your life to be like five years from now? the answers are quite often preceded by Provided there is still a world and Provided I am still alive. To the often-heard question, Who are they, this new generation? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.
-Hannah Arendt
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John 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.
-Isaac Asimov
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From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.
-Margot Asquith
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The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.
-Francis Bacon
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War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
-Walter Bagehot
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Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
-Walter Bagehot
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We
-Band of Brothers, Episode 3: Carentan
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If goods don t cross borders, armies will.
-Fr, attributed
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The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
-Charles Baudelaire
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It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.
-Baudouin I
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If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
-Simone de Beauvoir, All Men are Mortal, 1946
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If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
-Ruth Benedict
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All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
-Tony Benn
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The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.
-Friedrich Von Bernhardi
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If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
-Hans A. Bethe
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We are a conquering race. We must obey our blood and occupy new markets and if necessary new lands.
-Albert J. Beveridge
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Projectile - n. the final arbiter in international disputes. Formerly these disputes were resolved by physical contact of the disputants with such arguments as the rudimentary logic of the times would supply - sword, spear, and so forth. With the growth of prudence in military affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in high esteem by all. Its capital defect ( in Bierce's day ) has been that it requires personal attendance at the point of launch.
-Ambrose Bierce
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Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
-Otto von Bismarck
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If you have form'd a circle to go into,
Go into it yourself, and see how you would do.
They said this mystery never shall cease:
The priest promotes war, and the soldier peace.
-William Blake, To God The Rossetti Manuscript, 1810
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Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!
-Alexander Blok
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One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and charitable acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.
-Murray Bookchin
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War is like love, it always finds a way.
-Bertolt Brecht
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If this phrase of the balance of power is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure.
-John Bright
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For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis -- an American decision that this is sport, or that it is business.
-D. W. Brogan, The American Character
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After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
-William S. Burroughs
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The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.'
-George Carlin
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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.
-Jimmy Carter
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Rest in peace. The Mistake shall not be repeated.
-Cenotoph
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Military weapons are the means used by the Sage to punish violence and cruelty, to give peace to troublous times, to remove difficulties and dangers, and to succor those who are in peril. Every animal with blood in its veins and horns on its head will fight when it is attacked. How much more so will man, who carries in his breast the faculties of love and hatred, joy and anger! When he is pleased, a feeling of affection springs up within him; when angry, his poisoned sting is brought into play. That is the natural law which governs his being
http://unpress.bandersnatch.org/suntzu/artofwar.html#n0.58
-Ssu-ma Ch`ien, Shih Chi, ch. 25, fol. I.
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But out of that silence rose new sounds more appalling still; a strange ventriloquism, of which you could not locate the source, a smothered moan, as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key-note weird, unearthly, terrible to hear and bear, yet startling with its nearness; the writhing concord broken by cries for help, some begging for a drop of water, some calling on God for pity; and some on friendly hands to finish what the enemy had so horribly begun; some with delirious, dreamy voices murmuring loved names, as if the dearest were bending over them; and underneath, all the time, the deep bass note from closed lips too hopeless, or too heroic to articulate their agony...It seemed best to bestow myself between two dead men among the many left there by earlier assaults, and to draw another crosswise for a pillow out of the trampled, blood-soaked sod, pulling the flap of his coat over my face to fend off the chilling winds, and still more chilling, the deep, many voiced moan that overspread the field.
-Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, (At the end of the first day's fighting at Fredericksburg)
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...On they come, with the old swinging route step and swaying battle flags. In the van, the proud Confederate ensign. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood; men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond; was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured? On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word, nor whisper or vain-glorying, nor motion of man, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!
-Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, (Confederate surrender at Appomattox)
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That was what, ultimately, war did to you. It was not the physical dangers--the mines at sea, the bombs from the air, the crisp ping of a rifle bullet as you drove over a desert track. No, it was the spiritual danger of learning how much easier life was if you ceased to think.
-Agatha Christie
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We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;we shall never surrender.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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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.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.
-Karl von Clausewitz
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The first and most important rule to observe...is to use our entire forces with the utmost energy. The second rule is to concentrate our power as much as possible against that section where the chief blows are to be delivered and to incur disadvantages elsewhere, so that our chances of success may increase at the decisive point. The third rule is never to waste time. Unless important advantages are to be gained from hesitation, it is necessary to set to work at once. By this speed a hundred enemy measures are nipped in the bud, and public opinion is won most rapidly. Finally, the fourth rule is to follow up our successes with the utmost energy. Only pursuit of the beaten enemy gives the fruits of victory.
-Karl von Clausewitz
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It is far easier to make war than to make peace.
-Georges Clemenceau
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Say not, the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been, they remain.
If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
-Arthur H. Clough, The Land is Bright
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Next week Reagan will probably announce that American scientists have discovered that the entire U.S. agricultural surplus can be compacted into a giant tomato one thousand miles across, which will be suspended above the Kremlin from a cluster of U.S. satellites flying in geosynchronous orbit. At the first sign of trouble the satellites will drop the tomato on the Kremlin, drowning the fractious Muscovites in ketchup.
-Alexander Cockburn
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A just war is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
-Alexander Cockburn
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Five miles meandering with mazy motion,
Through dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank the tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn
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At the rate science proceeds, rockets and missiles will one day seem like buffalo -- slow, endangered grazers in the black pasture of outer space.
-Bernard Cooper
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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.
-Noel Coward
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It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.
-Aleister Crowley
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The Volunteer
AT dawn, he said, I bid them all farewell,
To go where bugles call and rifles gleam.
And with the restless thought asleep he fell,
And glided into dream.
A great hot plain from sea to mountain spread, -
Through it a level river slowly drawn:
He moved with a vast crowd, and at its head
Streamed banners like the dawn.
There came a blinding flash, a deafening roar,
And dissonant cries of triumph and dismay;
Blood trickled down the river's reedy shore,
And with the dead he lay.
The morn broke in upon his solemn dream,
And still, with steady pulse and deepening eye,
Where bugles call, he said, and rifles gleam,
I follow, though I die!
-Elbridge Jefferson Cutler, Yale Book of American Verse, Thomas R. Lounsbury, ed., 1912
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No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.
-Salvador Dali
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Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people.
-Rebecca Harding Davis
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Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace....They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.
-Eugene Debs
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War, he sung, is toil and trouble; Honor but an empty bubble.
-John Dryden
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Roused by the lash of his own stubborn tail our lion now will foreign foes assail.
-John Dryden
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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.
-John Foster Dulles
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We don't invade countries for the reasons we're told or we would've done a lot of things about a lot of things. They tell you things like they hate freedom so you're okay with them attacking but it's for other reasons.
-James Dye
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The artist must see the war with a unique vision. If he doesn't, then he hasn't added anything to our lives. We can pick up Time magazine and get that account of what happened, but what truly happened we must get from the artist. To me that war was a nightmare and it is best expressed in a surreal way. And that is why it is written in that style and in that attitude. War is a form of madness.
-William Eastlake, interview, 1978; referring to Castle Keep and WWII
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America is addicted to wars of distraction.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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The pioneers of a warless world are the young men and women who refuse military service.
-Albert Einstein
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I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.
-Albert Einstein
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He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable loce-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
-Albert Einstein
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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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children . . . Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/chance.htm
-Dwight D Eisenhower, from The Chance for Peace address delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953
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The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
-George Eliot
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War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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There is nothing that war has ever achieved we could not better achieve without it.
-Havelock Ellis
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The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
-Desiderius Erasmus
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Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
-David G. Farragut, Battle of Mobile Bay, August 5, 1864
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As she came up to the arch Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone.
She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillas identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them.
'Who are these, these ...?; She gestured with her hand.'
'These?' The man with the brush sounded surprised. 'The lost.'
'Men who died in battle?'
'No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in cemetries.'
'These are just the ... unfound?'
She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes.
When she could speak again, she said, 'from the whole war?'
The man shook his head. 'Just these fields.' He gestured with his arm.
Elizabeth went and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight.
'Nobody told me.' She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. 'My God, nobody told me.
-Sebastian Faulks, 'Birdsong' p. 264.
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Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city or those who choose to go to a front line, are obviously asking themselves to what extent they are cowards. But the tests they set themselves -- there is a dead body, can you bear to look at it? -- are nothing in comparison with the tests that are sprung on them. It is not the obvious tests that matter (do you go to pieces in a mortar attack?) but the unexpected ones (here is a man on the run, seeking your help -- can you face him honestly?).
-James Fenton
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I have tamed men of iron in my day, shall I not easily crush these men of butter?
-Duke of Alba Ferdinand Alvarez De Toledo
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My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.
-Marshal Ferdinand Foch, message sent during the first battle of the Marne, September, 1914
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I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
-Anne Frank
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What, oh, what is the use of the war? Why can
-Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl; entry dated May 3, 1944
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What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Morality is contraband in war.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.
-Charles De Gaulle
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A war is like when it rains in New York and everybody crowds into doorways, ya know? And they all get chummy together. Perfect strangers. The only difference, of course, is in a war it's also raining on the other side of the street and the people who are chummy over there are trying to kill the people who are over here who are chums.
-Larry Gelbart, Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H episode The Interview aired Feb. 24, 1976
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Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
-Martha Gellhorn
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Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.
-Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet"
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What if somebody gave a war and
Nobody came?
Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and
Forever be Itself again.
-Allen Ginsberg, Graffiti, 1972
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Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
-Hermann Goering
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I don't know a greater advantage, than to appreciate the worth of an enemy.
-Johann von Goethe
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I feel sure that coups d'?tat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the sheltered life. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.
-Sir Edmund Gosse
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The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.
-Ulysses Simpson Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1885
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Mick Jagger and I just really liked each other a lot. We talked all night. We had the same views on nuclear disarmament.
-Jerry Hall
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Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy.
-Dag Hammarskjold
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Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
He thought he
-Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed
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War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.
-Ian Hay
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The general who is able to persuade his forces that there is victory, even where there seems to be defeat, is one who will inspire them to fight against apparently impossible odds. They will, indeed, never suffer defeat, but will fight on until annihilated by capture or death. The secret of success even in the more pacific engagements of life lies in this principle
-H. E. E. Hayes
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Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
-William Hazlitt
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Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
-Joseph Heller
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I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway, Notes on the Next War, "published in Esquire Magazine (1935)"
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What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.
-John Hersey
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Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.
-Thomas Hobbes
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War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself.
-E. J. Hobsbawm
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I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war.
-Abbie Hoffman
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Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
-Herbert Hoover
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In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.
-Horace
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Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
-A.E. Housman
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The base emotions Plato banned have left a radio-active and not radiant land.
-Libby Houston
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Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
-Victor Hugo
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War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.
-Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
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For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.
-Hubert Humphrey
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A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
-Aldous Huxley
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The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.
-Washington Irving
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Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.
-Andrew Jackson
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If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.
-Thomas Jefferson
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What we believe is more important than our material existence, therefore warfare is a legitimate extension of values.
-Edward Johnson
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I have not yet begun to fight!
-John Paul Jones
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Confidence in the principles of an enemy must remain even during war, otherwise a peace could never be concluded; and hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination since war in fact is but the sad resource employed in a state of nature in defence of rights; force standing there in lieu of juridical tribunals. Neither of the two parties can be accused of injustice, since for that purpose a juridical decision would be necessary. But here the event of a battle (as formerly the judgments of God) determines the justice of either party; since between states there cannot be a war of punishment no subordination existing between them. A war, therefore, which might cause the destruction of both parties at once, together with the annihilation of every right, would permit the conclusion of a perpetual peace only upon the vast burial-ground of the human species.
-Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
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Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer concern the Great Powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war--or war will put an end to mankind.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy, The Role of the United Nations, Address Before the General Assembly of the United Nations, September 25, 1961
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We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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Oh, the brave Music of a distant drum!
-Omar Khayyam
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War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me.
-Neil Kinnock
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If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.
-Rudyard Kipling
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The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
-Henry Kissinger
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-Paul Klee, commenting on the fact that World War 1 had begun
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War is the father of all things. But who is the mother?
-Gerhard Kocher
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
-Arthur Koestler
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If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey.
-Arthur Koestler
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Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?
-KaThe Kollwitz
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War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
-Karl Kraus
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War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off;
next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off;
then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off;
and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
-Karl Kraus
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The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.
-Lewis H. Lapham
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The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters -- not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.
-Frieda Lawrence
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It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.
-General Robert E. Lee, at the battle of Fredricksburg
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What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
-General Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
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If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.
-Curtis LeMay
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When I hold you in my arms and I feel my finger on your trigger I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun.
-John Lennon
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I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
-Elmore Leonard
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Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you.
-Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
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If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Cannons and fire-arms are cruel and damnable machines; I believe them to have been the direct suggestion of the Devil. If Adam had seen in a vision the horrible instruments his children were to invent, he would have died of grief.
-Martin Luther
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I see that old flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.
-General Douglas MacArthur
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I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.
-General Douglas MacArthur
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People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil
-General Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences, pp. 216, speech to the people of the Philippines, on Leyte, October 17, 1944
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In war there is no substitute for victory.
-General Douglas MacArthur
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There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
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The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
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It should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler ought to determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He should inflict them once and for all, and not have to renew them every day.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
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What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
-Archibald MacLeish
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Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded.
-James Madison
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The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.
-James Madison
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War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.
-Joseph De Maistre
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Wars are carried out by large organizations; Peace is brought one by one.
-Rachel Manor
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The emotional security and political stability in this country entitle us to be a nuclear power.
-Sir Ronald Mason
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Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.
-Allan Massie
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I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
-George McGovern
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Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.
-Francis Meehan
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In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine cones lay-the rusted gun,
Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat
And cuddled up skeleton;
And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan;
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged-
But the year and the Man were gone.
-Herman Melville
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
-H. L. Mencken
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War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice,
-John Stuart Mill, "First published in Fraser"
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No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.
-Henry Miller
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War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.
-Ludwig von Mises
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I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!
-Mary Wortley Montagu
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War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
-Lewis Mumford
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Anyone who isn't confused doesn't really understand the situation.
-Edward R. Murrow, (remark on the Vietnam War)
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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.
-Benito Mussolini
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In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
-Jose Narosky
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What should we do? We have no wish to interrupt the destroyer's work of saving lives... But war is war and the people being picked up out of the water are soldiers bound for the front; soldiers who are to shoot at our German brothers... The question whether we are to perish in despair or defiance, or survive all trails with a live conscience, depends wholly and solely on whether we believe in the forgiveness of sins. This 25th January was the turning point in my life, because it opened my eyes to the utter impossibility of a moral universe.
the source of this quotation notes: On 25th January 1918, Martin Niem
-Martin Niem, From U-boat to Pulpit, 1934
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The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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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.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.
-Florence Nightingale
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The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.
-Sean O'Casey
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The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
-George Orwell
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There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
-George Orwell
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The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This
-George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 17
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It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, -
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
http://www.pitt.edu/~pugachev/greatwar/owen.html
-Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting, 1917
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What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in The hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine The holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
-Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth
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There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation alter nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.
-Thomas Paine
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The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.
-Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
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Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?
-Leslie Parrish-Bach
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It is certain that the two World Wars in which I have participated would not have occurred had we been prepared. It is my belief that adequate preparation on our part would have prevented or materially shortened all our other wars beginning with that of 1812. Yet, after each of our wars, there has always been a great hue and cry to the effect that there will be no more wars, that disarmament is the sure road to health, happiness, and peace; and that by removing the fire department, we will remove fires. These ideas spring from wishful thinking and from the erroneous belief that wars result from logical processes. There is no logic in wars. They are produced by madmen. No man can say when future madmen will reappear. I do not say that there will be no more wars; I devoutly hope that there will not, but I do say that the chances of avoiding future wars will be greatly enhanced if we are ready.
-General George Patton
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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.
-General George Patton
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There's only one proper way for a professional soldier to die. That's from the last bullet, of the last battle, of the last war.
-General George Patton
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This war burns our houses. It sows dead executed in open squares and roads. It chases us like hares from refuge to refuge. It will end up by forcing us to fight, to wring out an active approval. And the day will come when nobody will be outside the war, neither cowards, nor the sad, nor the lonely...
But I saw the unknown dead, dead members of the Italian Social Republic. If a stranger, an enemy becomes such a thing when he dies, if we stop dead fearing to step over him, it means that even the defeated enemy is someone who after spilling blood must be pacified. This blood must be given a voice and those who spilled it must be justified. It is humiliating to look at certain dead. They are not others
-Cesare Pavese, House on the Hill
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Up men to your posts! Don't forget today that you are from old Virginia.
-Gen. George Pickett, Gettysburg, July 3, 1863
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The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
-Ezra Pound
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Wars are made to make debt.
-Ezra Pound
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Don't one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
N.B.: A lesser-known version of this quotation was supposedly said by Frederick the Great at Prague in 1757: By push of bayonets, no firing till you see the whites of their eyes.
-Colonel William Prescott, Battle of Bunker Hill, 1775
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War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune.
-Sir Walter Raleigh
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You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
-Jeannette Rankin
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So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride -- the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.
-Ronald Reagan
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Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
-Ronald Reagan
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History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. To keep the peace, we and our allies must be strong enough to convince any potential aggressor that war could bring no benefit, only disaster.
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.htm
-Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation and Other Countries on United States-Soviet Relations, January 16, 1984
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We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
-Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, chapter 5, pg. 88.
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I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.
-Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, chapter 10, pg. 263.
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More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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War is a contagion.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Slowly, and in spite of anything we Americans do or do not do, it looks a little as if you and some other good people are going to have to answer the old question of whether you want to keep your country unshackled by taking even more definite steps to do so
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line
-Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chautauqua, New York, 1936
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 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.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Those who dare to interpret God's will must never claim Him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.
-Robert Runcie
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War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
-Bertrand Russell
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With civilized men..., it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out; the emotion is exactly the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat more serious.
-Bertrand Russell, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1950
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I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.
-Bertrand Russell
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The kids are saying 'Make Love, Not War',
and I'm beginning to think they're right.
For war costs millions of dollars a day,
and love--just a few bucks a night!
-Nipsey Russell
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Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated -- there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
-George Santayana
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
-George Santayana, Persons and Places, 1944
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If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.
-Dorothy L. Sayers
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Once respect has been initiated, war is less provocative.
-Andrea Scholer
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A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can't do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war. Any soldier worth his salt should be antiwar. And still, there are things worth fighting for.
-Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
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We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name.
-William Shakespeare
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Cry havoc! and let loose the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial.
-William Shakespeare
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War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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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.
-Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
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War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent -- war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.
-Susan Sontag
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If the Lord should once more give us sunshine and I do not give you enough fighting, I will never ask you to come out again.
But had daylight lasted one hour longer, Stark reported later, we should have taken the whole body of them.
-General John Stark, said before The Battle of Bennington, August 16, 1777
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The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.
-John Steinbeck
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Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
-Sun-Tzu
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All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
-Sun-Tzu
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Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
-Sun-Tzu
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The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
-Sun-Tzu
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If I wish to engage, then the enemy, for all his high ramparts and deep moat, cannot avoid engagement; I attack that which he is obliged to rescue.
-Sun-Tzu, The Art of War
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17. Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
(1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
(2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
(3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
(4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
(5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
18. Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself you will succumb in every battle.
-Sun-Tzu, The Art of War Translated from the Chinese by LIONEL GILES, M.A. (1910)
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The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
-Henry David Thoreau
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I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.
-Henry David Thoreau
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There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
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There are two things that a democratic people will always find very difficult, to begin a war and to end it.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
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The atom bomb was no great decision. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.
-Harry S Truman
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We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.
-Harriet Tubman, In Divided Houses, Ch. 7 by Lyde Cullen Sizer (1992), On the Civil War during which she was a spy for the Union
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O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
-Mark Twain
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War -- what a waist of time. It's all about great achievements for the very few but hideous losses for the very many.
-Source Unknown
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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
-John Updike
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Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
-Vegetius
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What our sword has won in half a year, our sword must guard for half a century.
-Helmuth Graf Von Moltke
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What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.
-Kurt Vonnegut
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According to other writers, it is the women who last longest in sieges, the young men who soonest fall into that deadly lethargy that precedes actual death. But the account is accurate enough: that is what a siege is like. Moreover, that is what it is meant to be like. When a city is encircled and deprived of food, it is not the expectation of the attackers that the garrison will hold out until individual soldiers... drop dead in the streets. The death of ordinary inhabitants of the city is expected to force the hand of the civilian or military leadership. The goal is surrender; the means is not the defeat of the enemy army, but the fearful spectacle of the civilian dead.
-Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, NY: Basic Books, 1977, p. 161.
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So you think you can tell heaven from hell - blue skies from pain? Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, a smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts - hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change? Did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?
-Roger Waters, from the song "Wish You Were Here"
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A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
-Simone Weil
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What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
-Simone Weil
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The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
-William Westmoreland
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War is fear cloaked in courage.
-William Westmoreland
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The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it -- the speed of his acceptance.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have it's fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
-Oscar Wilde
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There is no such thing as a man being too proud to fight; there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.
-Woodrow Wilson, Speech in Philadelphia, May 10, 1915
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The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.
-Virginia Woolf, "New Republic", October 21, 1940
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Life was a colorful painful pageant to her, in which right and wrong were wobbly yardsticks. Values and morals varied with time and place. Sweeping righteous views, like Victor Henry's Christian morality and Rule's militant socialism, tended to cause much hell and to cramp what little happiness there was to be had. So she thought.
-Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance
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I have found that the Way of the samurai is death. This means that when you are compelled to choose between life and death, you must quickly choose death.
note from Answers.com: used as a military slogan during the early 20th century to encourage soldiers to throw themselves into battle
-Yamamoto Tsunetomo
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I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
-William Butler Yeats
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Wars--and what is war except crime on a mass scale?--destroy rather than produce. The vandal that destroys a window causes not only the owner to bear the costs of replacing it, but costs those whom he planned on using that money to buy from. The same goes for wars. The warlords--of war and peace--destroyed so much, not only what existed, but all those new things that could have existed, if only individuals were left in peace.
-Adam Young
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Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. Military and economic power is necessarily wielded by people.
-Mao Zedong
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Books about War
