Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

war

Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one it is man and not materials that counts.

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy but after a war it seems more like astrology.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace.

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.

The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.

War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.

War is never a solution it is an aggravation.

A bad peace is even worse than war.

All oppression creates a state of war.

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

God employs several translators some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.

I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.

I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash.

It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.

It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.

It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.

My mother lived in Holland, and during World War II was incarcerated in a Japanese camp for three years.

One may know how to gain a victory, and know not how to use it.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

The war we have to wage today has only one goal and that is to make the world safe for diversity.

The war... was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.

There is peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

This war is not about slavery.

War is a contagion.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

What a cruel thing war is... to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.

We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since the war began.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

War kills men, and men deplore the loss but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

You can easily die racing to cover a bank robbery as you can in a war zone.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.

We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

He belonged to that army known as invincible in peace, invisible in war.

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.

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.

I won't undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.

I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.

Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.

The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

There's many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but it is all hell.

To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.

War - An act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.

War is at its best barbarism.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

War is hell.

War is like love it always finds a way.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

I said in my heart that, rather than have war, I would give up my country.

I saw clearly that war was upon us when I learned that my young men had been secretly buying ammunition.

I saw that the war could not be prevented. The time had passed.

In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

It required a strong heart to stand up against such talk, but I urged my people to be quiet and not to begin a war.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Nullification means insurrection and war and the other states have a right to put it down.

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

War can be avoided, and it ought to be avoided. I want no war.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

War is a blessing compared with national degradation.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

We had good white friends who advised us against taking the war path. My friend and brother, Mr. Chapman, told us just how the war would end.

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

Be polite write diplomatically even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

War is not the answer, because only love can conquer hate.

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war love is a growing up.

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

The real war will never get in the books.

There is no avoiding war it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

War is just when it is necessary arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.

We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon - no alternative.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

What is more immoral than war?

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.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Peace is produced by war.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

Business is a combination of war and sport.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

I ended the war a horse ahead.

I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.

I have not yet begun to fight!

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war.

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.

War is just a racket... I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.

What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

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.

War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

War would end if the dead could return.

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education all politics can do is keep us out of war.

I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I'm tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow... that are the aftermath of war.

Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.

Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.

This is not Johnson's war. This is America's war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.

Vice stirs up war, virtue fights.

War is the business of barbarians.

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

War is the trade of Kings.

I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.

If we don't end war, war will end us.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

Monarchs ought to put to death the authors and instigators of war, as their sworn enemies and as dangers to their states.

No more war! Never again war! If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.

Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn't have as many monuments to unveil.

Peace is the happy natural state of man war is corruption and disgrace.

There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

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.

War settles nothing.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

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.

For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

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.

Making peace is harder than making war.

May the same Almighty Goodness banish the accursed monster, war, from all lands, with her hated associates, rapine and insatiable ambition!

Morality is contraband in war.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

A peace that depends on fear is nothing but a suppressed war.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It's this - no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Sweat saves blood.

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

The concept of war crimes is an American invention.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

The United States never lost a war or won a conference.

There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

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.

War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

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.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.