War Quotes
Most popular war quotes
Has it ever struck you that one of the most serious consequences of this war is what Kirk calls 'the survival of the unfittest'? All those who have the courage to do so and are physically sound, are going off to be shot: those who survive are moral and physical weeds – a fact which does not promise favourably for the next generation.
And the worst part about making a soldier of a man is not that a soldier kills brown men or white men, but that the soldier loses his own soul.
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
Military glory --the attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood.
I can make a General in five minutes but a good horse is hard to replace.
Honor to the Soldier, and Sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his countrys cause. Honor also to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as he best can, the same cause honor to him, only less than to him, who braves, for the common good, the storms of heaven and the storms of battle.
He who does something at the head of one Regiment, will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred.
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.
Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, and every war has to me the horror of a family feud.
The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights confront each other.
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
The soldiers fight, and the kings are heroes.
When elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers.
Might does not make right; it only makes history.
In war there is no second prize for the runner-up.
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.
A peace which depends upon fear is nothing but a suppressed war.
Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.
Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.
To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?
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.
Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.
I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade.
The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
Peace is the exhaustion of strife, and is only secure in her triumphs in being in instant readiness for war.
Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.
Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.
You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.
You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
War never leaves a nation where it found it.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
The grass-roots support is not there. And we have to prevent it from developing again.
Terrorism has become the systematic weapon of a war that knows no borders or seldom has a face.
The spirit of war can never be destroyed by all the butcheries and persecutions the human mind can invent.
A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism.
Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible.
Violence seldom accomplishes permanent and desired results. Herein lies the futility of war.
War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
Trees, though they are cut and looped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again.
The law is silent during war.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!
War is the business of barbarians.
God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions.
The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.
Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.
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.
War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.
It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.
It is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one, since its beginning and end are not under the control of the same man.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.
It is all too obvious that if we do not abolish war on this earth, then surely one day, war will abolish us from the earth.
Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.
It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement.
A general bit of shooting.....takes the mind off the cost of living.
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.
A hand on your cock is more moral-and more fun-than a finger on the trigger.
In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.
You're not here to die for your country; you're here to make those so-and-sos die for theirs.
A war without headquarters is an expedition.
Self-defense is not fear.
War ends nothing.
Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another.
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
War's tragedy is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.
In wartime, Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
The first casualty of war is truth.
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.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art.
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, that it is inside ourselves.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.
The sinews of war, unlimited money.
War is the continuation of politics by other means.
Wars of pen and ink often lead to wars of cannon and bayonets.
War is a severe doctor; but it sometimes heals grievances.
But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.
War has to be nourished by lies.
War is the trade of kings.
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood. Everybody lies.
I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
It is well that this is so terrible! We should grow too fond of it!
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
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.
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.
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.
War is capitalism with the gloves off.
War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.
The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantage: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know by what you do.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
War is fear cloaked in courage.
War is nothing but a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
Some wars have been due to the lust of rulers for power and glory, or to revenge to wipe out the humiliation of a former defeat.
War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.
When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled on.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
We have all taken risks in the making of war. Isn't it time that we should take risks to secure peace?
We make war that we may live in peace.
Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total ... because it may well involve the whole world.
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighbouring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
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.
