Quotations on War
- "In war, truth is the first casualty.--
Aeschylus - "We make war that we may live in peace."--
Aristotle - "To save your world you asked this man to die; Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?"--
W. H. Auden - "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte - "When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country."
-- Elayne Boosler - "The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts."
--Omar Bradley (1893 - 1981), Speech to Boston Chamber of Commerce, 1948 - "War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with."
--Lois McMaster Bujold, "The Vor Game", 1990 - "War is not nice."
--Barbara Bush (1925 - ) - "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a 2 million dollar missile at a 10 dollar empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive. "
-- George W. Bush (Newsweek, Sep 24, 2001)Vietnam Reflections - "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 - "How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."--
Neville Chamberlain - "We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will."--
Neville Chamberlain - "War is a catalogue of blunders."
-- Sir Winston Churchill, 1874-1965 - "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 - "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
--Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) - "One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'."
--Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965), Second World War (1948) - "One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one."
--Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976), Autobiography (1977) - "War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory."
--Georges Clemenceau (1841 - 1929) - "War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military."
--Georges Clemenceau (1841 - 1929)Flag Raising on Iwo Jima, February 23... - "Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior."--
Carl von Clausewitz - "War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means."--
Carl von Clausewitz - "Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die."
--Salvador Dali - "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, science 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 love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable an ignorable 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 - "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
--Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) - "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."
--Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) (attributed) - "War is delightful to those who have not experienced it."
-- Desiderius Erasmus - "When you appeal to force, there's one thing you must never do - lose."--
Dwight D. Eisenhower - "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." --
General Dwight D. EisenhowerLIFEB. - General Eisenhower Watching Tanks at Practice Range 1944... - "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!"
--David G. Farragut, Battle of Mobile Bay, August 5, 1864 - "The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility."
-- John Arbuthnot Fisher - "By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . . "--
Janet Flanner - "Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting."--
Janet Flanner - "Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. "
-- John Fowles (The Magus, 1965) - "Either war is obsolete or men are."
--R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983), New Yorker, Jan. 8, 1966 - "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
--Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), "Non-Violence in Peace and War" - "Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies."
--W. L. George - "Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being."
--Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet - "The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling."
--Walter Goodman - "The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving."
--Ulysses S. Grant (1822 - 1885) - "Young men make wars and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution."
-- Alec Guinness, as Prince Feisal, Lawrence of Arabia, 1962 - "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
-- Ernest Hemingway - "I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war."
-- Abbie Hoffman - "The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council."
--Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Iliad - "Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die."--
Herbert Hoover - "I have not yet begun to fight!"
--John Paul Jones - "Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy - "Bombs do not choose. They will hit everything."--
Nikita Khrushchev - "The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace."--
Nikita Khrushchev - "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
--Robert E. Lee (1807 - 1870)Pickett's Charge 1913 Gettysburg Reunion - "I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
--George McGovern - "Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."
-- Groucho Marx - "A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-- John Stuart Mill - "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-- John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) - "Preparation for war is a constant stimulus to suspicion and ill will."--
James Monroe - "Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."--
Wilfred Owen - "I'm for peace - I've yet to see a man wake up in the morning and say, 'I've just had a good war.''
-- Mae West - "We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush...And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up."
-- Michael Moore (at the 2003 Oscars®) - "He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy's life."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - "How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - "Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm NietzscheVietnam Memory Wall - "The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand."
-- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four - "The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
--George Orwell (1903 - 1950), Polemic, May 1946, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" - "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
-- General George Patton - "Up men to your posts! Don't forget today that you are from old Virginia."
--Gen. George Pickett, Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 - "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 - "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."
--Jeannette Rankin (1880 - 1973) - "Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week."
--Will Rogers (1879 - 1935) - "You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way."
--Will Rogers (1879 - 1935), New York Times, Dec. 23, 1929 - "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. RooseveltPearl Harbor - "War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
--Bertrand Russell - "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."
--Carl Sandburg (1878 - 1967), The People, Yes (1936) - "War is hell."
-- General William Tecumseh Sherman - "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 anying 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."
-- H. Norman Schwarzkopf - "The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky"
--Solomon Short - "We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change."
-- Serj Tankian - "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
-- Leon Trotsky - "Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."
--Mao Tse-Tung (1893 - 1976) - "There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare."
-- Sun Tzu - "Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate."--
Sun Tzu - "The best victory is when the opponent surrenders of its own accord before there are any actual hostilities...It is best to win without fighting."--
Sun Tzu - "A military operation involves deception. Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective."--
Sun Tzu - "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."--
Sun Tzu - "The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars."
--William Westmoreland - "No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence."--
Woodrow Wilson
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