War Quotes
War is a subject that forces uncomfortable honesty -- about strategy, sacrifice, human nature, and the costs of conflict. These quotes come from soldiers, strategists, and writers who understood that war reveals truths most people would rather avoid.
They're useful for history essays, military presentations, debate preparation, or reflective writing on conflict and peace. Browse the collection for perspectives that are unflinching and thought-provoking.
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“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”
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“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
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“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”
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“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
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“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”
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“Only the dead have seen the end of the war.”
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“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”
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“War does not determine who is right - only who is left.”
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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.”
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“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
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“In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.”
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“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”
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“We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.”
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“Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.”
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“There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.”
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“If we don't end war, war will end us.”
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“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
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“You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.”
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“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”
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“The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.”
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“When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.”
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“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.”
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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 that nothing is worth war is much worse.”
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“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
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“The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.”
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“Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
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“I will not play tug o' war. I'd rather play hug o' war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins.”
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“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
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“Sweat saves blood.”
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“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.”
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“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.”
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“I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
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“Next to a lost battle, nothing is so sad as a battle that has been won.”
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“The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.”
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“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
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“Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.”
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“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”
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“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
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“There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.”
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“The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.”
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“If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?”
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“War is a defeat for humanity.”
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“It is not only the living who are killed in war.”
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“I have not yet begun to fight!”
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“Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.”
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“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
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“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
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“There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.”
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“All warfare is based on deception.”
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“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”
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“War is the science of destruction.”
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“War remains the decisive human failure.”
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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. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.”
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“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”
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“War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.”
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“The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
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“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
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“Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.”
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“Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.”
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“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
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“War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.”
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“War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always.”
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“War would end if the dead could return.”
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“A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.”
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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.”
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“The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.”
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“War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.”
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“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”
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“My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.”
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“It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.”
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“There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.”
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“It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.”
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“War is fear cloaked in courage.”
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“We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since the war began.”
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“The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.”
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“The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.”
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“An unjust peace is better than a just war.”
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“There was never a good war, or a bad peace.”
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“Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.”
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“Conquered, we conquer.”
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“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
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“An army marches on its stomach.”
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“I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.”
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“What a cruel thing war is… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”
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“If it were a fact, it wouldn't be called intelligence.”
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“War is hell.”
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“Remember, God provides the best camouflage several hours out of every 24.”
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“One may know how to gain a victory, and know not how to use it.”
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“How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.”
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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. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.”
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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.”
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“Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.”
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“To win this war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”
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“In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.”
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“If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.”
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“When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.”
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“In battle it is the cowards who run the most risk; bravery is a rampart of defense.”
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“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
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“War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.”
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“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
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“The great object is that every man be armed.”
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“You can't say civilization don't advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.”
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“Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.”
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“A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.”
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“War… is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.”
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“The war… was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.”
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“We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.”
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“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
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“Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.”
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“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That's the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!”
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“One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”
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“Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.”
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“In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash.”
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“A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.”
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“The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.”
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“What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.”
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“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”
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“No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.”
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“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.”
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“The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.”
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“In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.”
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“All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.”
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“The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.”
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“We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.”
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“Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.”
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“To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”
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“The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.”
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“If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.”
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“Wars are caused by undefended wealth.”
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“No matter what you think about the Iraq war, there is one thing we can all agree on for the next days - we have to salute the courage and bravery of those who are risking their lives to vote and those brave Iraqi and American soldiers fighting to protect their right to vote.”
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“I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.”
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“The Establishment center… has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.”
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“It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.”
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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.”
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“The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.”
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“It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.”
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“What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?”
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“It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We're reaching a time that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.”
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“We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.”
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“War makes thieves and peace hangs them.”
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“Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.”
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“War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.”
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“But when will our leaders learn - war is not the answer.”
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“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.”
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“Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”
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“The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.”
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“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.”
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“A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It's in your mind. We're all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.”
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“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”
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“The sinews of war are infinite money.”
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“War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.”
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“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”
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“We make war that we may live in peace.”
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“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”
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“Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.”
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“In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”
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“The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”
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“We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.”
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“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”
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“To hold a pen is to be at war.”
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“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”
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“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.”
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“I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.”
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“I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.”
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“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”
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“War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”
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“The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.”
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“Our soldiers fought in the Korean War to push back communism. As a result of their effort and the effort of our allies, South Korea is free today.”
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“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.”
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“No alliance in history has done more to prevent war, and no alliance is more rooted in the values America champions, than NATO.”
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“A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars.”
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“War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.”
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“War has rules, mud wrestling has rules - politics has no rules.”
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“I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.”
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“We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good… when trade stops, war comes.”
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“I think NATO is a Cold War product. I think NATO historically should have shut up shop in 1990 along with the Warsaw Pact; unfortunately, it didn't.”
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“Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.”
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“Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.”
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“Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it… You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.”
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“The best way to solve problems and to fight against war is through dialogue.”
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“The war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.”
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“Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.”
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“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
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“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.”
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“France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.”
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“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”
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“You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.”
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“Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
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“We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.”
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“Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.”
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“War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.”
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“War is never a lasting solution for any problem.”
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“People always make war when they say they love peace.”
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“If there is no Ukrainian strong army, there will be no Ukraine, and that will be the case when everyone will understand… it's not the war in Ukraine, it's the war in Europe. We are defending our country, our land. We are not attacking anyone, because that is immoral.”
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“The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.”
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“The most important thing in our war preparations is to teach all our people to hate U.S. imperialism. Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority.”
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“The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world?”
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“The one question I would have for Donald Trump is inspired by his 'Make America Great Again' cap. I would ask him, 'When was America great? When did America not have an economic depression or a war?'”
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“The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.”
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“It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don't regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn't save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I'm not naive, and I don't romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.”
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“We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon - no alternative.”
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“War is failure of diplomacy.”
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“War is not only a matter of equipment, artillery, group troops or air force; it is largely a matter of spirit, or morale.”
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“War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.”
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“Satan has declared war on motherhood. He knows that those who rock the cradle can rock his earthly empire. And he knows that without righteous mothers loving and leading the next generation, the Kingdom of God will fail.”
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“War is a racket. It always has been… A few profit - and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.”
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“I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.”
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“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.”
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“The war on drugs has made government more powerful, citizens less free, and hasn't helped users or addicts.”
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“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention.”
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“In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.”
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“War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.”
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“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
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“I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go… It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, 'Wait a second? Didn't we just get through with that?'”
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“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.”
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“The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.”
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“If we lose the war in the air we lose the war and we lose it quickly.”
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“Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.”
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“Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.”
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“The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.”
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“A bad peace is even worse than war.”
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“What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.”
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“Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we're going to win.”
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“Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.”
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“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.”
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“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
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“There are only two sides to this question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots and traitors.”
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“All oppression creates a state of war.”
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“Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.”
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“I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.”
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“The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism: a complex interplay of nation-state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.”
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“Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.”
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“To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.”
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“Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.”
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“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.”
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“The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.”
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“I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.”
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“Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.”
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“In time of peace prepare for war.”
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“The Great Depression of the 1930s saw more American unmarried women working from nine to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the number of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again.”
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“I am against all war.”
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“The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.”
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“No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.”
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“The woman power of this nation can be the power which makes us whole and heals the rotten community, now so shattered by war and poverty and racism. I have great faith in the power of women who will dedicate themselves whole-heartedly to the task of remaking our society.”
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“Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.”
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“What mattered in the cold war was weight - how big are your missiles? How heavy are your tanks? What matters in globalisation is speed. How fast is your modem? How good are you communications?”
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“It takes a few to make war, but it takes a village and a nation to build peace.”
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“The history of mankind is a history of war.”
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“We live in an age, in an era where there is so much negativity, there is so much violence in the world, there is so much unrest and people are at war, that I wanted to promote the word love and red signifies love.”
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“I am an opponent of Saddam Hussein, but an opponent also, of the sanctions that have killed a million Iraqi children and an opponent of the United States' apparent desire to plunge the Middle East into a new and devastating war.”
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“World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.”
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“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.”
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“If you persist in your purpose of secession, there will be war - a bloody and cruel war. Not only will the North fight, but she will also triumph. The experiment of secession will fail, and the South, in ruin and desolation, will bitterly repent the day when she attempted to overthrow a wise and beneficent government.”
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“In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.”
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“War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.”
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“Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.”
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“History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”
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“I have observed that baseball is not unlike a war, and when you come right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.”
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“There are two ways to fight the United States military: asymmetrically and stupid. Asymmetrically means you're going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it's like we called Saddam's army out into the schoolyard and beat up that army.”
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“Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.”
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“The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory.”
-
“I'm not afraid to say I'm at war with the pigs.”
-
“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”
-
“When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.”
-
“I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.”
-
“During the Cold War, the non-aligned movement tried to become a 'third force' in world politics, but failed because it was too large and unwieldy.”
-
“The lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that - and who won't leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn't.”
-
“There is no alternative to peace. There is no sense to go to war.”
-
“Earthshaking fire from the center of the Earth will cause tremors around the New City. Two great rocks will war for a long time, then Arethusa will redden a new river.”
-
“Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.”
-
“War itself is the enemy of the human race.”
-
“Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?”
-
“Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.”
-
“Peace and not war is the father of all things.”
-
“The peasant must always be helped technically, economically, morally and culturally. The guerrilla fighter will be a sort of guiding angel who has fallen into the zone, helping the poor always and bothering the rich as little as possible in the first phases of the war.”
-
“Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.”
-
“I want a world without war, a world without insanity. I want to see people do well. I don't even think it's as much as what I want for myself. It's more what I want for the people around me. That's what I want.”
-
“World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.”
-
“War is what happens when language fails.”
-
“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”
-
“The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.”
-
“War is the continuation of politics by other means.”
-
“War makes strange bedfellows.”
-
“Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”
-
“After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.”
-
“Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.”
-
“I had a very strong feeling about the Vietnam War, and I had a strong feeling about participating in it. The military draft was in place, I was summoned for a physical exam, and I was either going to be classified as fit for military service or make my objection to it. So I made my objection to it.”
-
“God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.”
-
“War is like love; it always finds a way.”
-
“I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.”
-
“The Gulf War is responsible for the huge and horrifying rise in Islamic terrorism.”
-
“It is the function of the Navy to carry the war to the enemy so that it is not fought on U.S. soil.”
-
“Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war.”
-
“War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.”
-
“In the 1930s one was aware of two great evils - mass unemployment and the threat of war.”
-
“Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.”
-
“The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.”
-
“War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.”
-
“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!”
-
“I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.”
-
“During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.”
-
“The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.”
-
“The forest restoration campaign is a war to ameliorate nature.”
-
“Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.”
-
“Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.”
-
“No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.”
-
“If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.”
-
“I'm of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little… Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.”
-
“I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy. If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.”
-
“Terrorism has become the systematic weapon of a war that knows no borders or seldom has a face.”
-
“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”
-
“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”
-
“It is far easier to make war than peace.”
-
“My ancestors include Monahwee, who was one of the leaders in the Red Stick War, which was the largest Indian uprising in history, and Osceola, who refused to sign a treaty with the United States.”
-
“The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.”
-
“Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.”
-
“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.”
-
“Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'”
-
“I'm not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I'm going to say I'm opposed to war. But I'm also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.”
-
“Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress.”
-
“War is not the answer, because only love can conquer hate.”
-
“There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.”
-
“'Pears like my heart go flutter, flutter, and then they may say, 'Peace, Peace,' as much as they likes - I know it's goin' to be war!”
-
“I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn't have anything. It's influenced the way I look at the world.”
-
“Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.”
-
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
-
“We all want a world without war, without conflict, without human suffering.”
-
“War is often about making the least-worst decision. The same could be said about politics. But the stakes are higher in war, when the commander-in-chief is called upon to defend the nation.”
-
“I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong. I don't know how to explain it more. It's universal. Some people are better at dealing with it, and they sleep with no pain - not pain, arguments. I've grown quite comfortable with being at war.”
-
“One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you'd see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.”
-
“It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. If everyone was straight-laced and uptight, it would sure be a drag. We need a little tug of war in society.”
-
“He was a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I'll show you a loser, show me a hero and I'll show you a corpse.”
-
“Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.”
-
“I was born into Sudan's civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.”
-
“Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.”
-
“We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment. Many things have been said about me which are wrong, and which white and black persons here, who stood by me through the war, can contradict.”
-
“I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.”
-
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
-
“For children of my generation, anime was an escape from Japan's loser complex following World War II. Anime wasn't foreign. It was our own.”
-
“The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War.”
-
“Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.”
-
“Public diplomacy was an effective Cold War weapon.”
-
“A nation's ability to fight a modern war is as good as its technological ability.”
-
“Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?”
-
“A hospital alone shows what war is.”
-
“In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.”
-
“I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.”
-
“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.”
-
“Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.”
-
“A quality education grants us the ability to fight the war on ignorance and poverty.”
-
“Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.”
-
“Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.”
-
“In any war, mistakes happen on the ground; this is not the policy of the government. We are a government that functions according to laws.”
-
“I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.”
-
“An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.”
-
“Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.”
-
“I didn't see conflict during the Vietnam War, but I did lose close friends.”
-
“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.”
-
“The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.”
-
“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.”
-
“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”
-
“The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.”
-
“I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were 'German dogs.' They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.”
-
“My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.”
-
“There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.”
-
“If this war is not fought with the greatest brutality against the bands both in the East and in the Balkans then in the foreseeable future the strength at our disposal will not be sufficient to be able to master this plague.”
-
“There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.”
-
“When we went into World War II, I was a tractor driver then. I drove tractors on the plantation. So when they start calling people my age, 18, up, I was one they called.”
-
“If our most highly qualified General Staff officers had been told to work out the most nonsensical high level organization for war which they could think of, they could not have produced anything more stupid that that which we have at present.”
-
“There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.”
-
“'Boy,' 'October,' 'War,' 'The Unforgettable Fire' and 'The Joshua Tree,' those records, they're part of my musical DNA and structure.”
-
“Business is a combination of war and sport.”
-
“If you want to go anywhere in modern war, in the air, on the sea, on the land, you must have command of the air.”
-
“War's stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first; you have to talk last anyway.”
-
“Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.”
-
“On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 A.M. that morning, Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack - as were the CIA and the rest of the world.”
-
“It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.”
-
“The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.”
-
“We can't afford to lose all that we've built from the ashes of the Korean War.”
-
“I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.”
-
“A peaceful world requires collective measures for the prevention of war, international cooperation to solve economic and social problems, and respect for human rights.”
-
“I believe that democracies do not go to war; that's the lesson of history, and I think that a democratic Pakistan is the world community's best guarantee of stability in Asia.”
-
“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.”
-
“It is not only the people of Gaza that can't afford having a fourth war - all the world cannot afford this.”
-
“If the military might of Germany and Japan are ultimately to be crushed, the United Nations, one and all, must definitely and urgently strive toward a total war effort.”
-
“We are muddled into war.”
-
“In Afghanistan, Biden's woke generals tucked their tail and ran. He dishonored the sacrifices made by every American soldier who fought in the 20-year war, especially those who gave their life for the cause.”
-
“God put me on this earth to bring souls back to the Kingdom of God. You don't need to pray ten times a day - you just need hope. My music is going to stop war; it's the healing music. I see myself in Brazil, in Syria, in Darfur, and places where they really need hope.”
-
“The ancient Jewish people gave the world the vision of eternal peace, of universal disarmament, of abolishing the teaching and learning of war.”
-
“As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.”
-
“For what can war, but endless war, still breed?”
-
“Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.”
-
“I can't go to war with paparazzi.”
-
“War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.”
-
“My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.”
-
“The Korean War has also show quite clearly that in a major conflict manpower is as important as horsepower.”
-
“War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.”
-
“No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.”
-
“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not… with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
-
“War is just one more big government program.”
-
“The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”
-
“Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.”
-
“I remember the youth movement in 1968. It started on American university campuses as a protest against the Vietnam war, then came to Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. Within a year, you had an uprising of youth against their elders.”
-
“If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.”
-
“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
-
“When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.”
-
“Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.”
-
“Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.”
-
“For me, true beauty has nothing to do with wrinkles and everything to do with the fact that my maternal grandmother raised five children just after the war and remained a fighter throughout her life. True beauty is the slick of red lipstick my paternal grandmother would put on before going to church on Sunday.”
-
“There is only one principle of war and that's this. Hit the other fellow, as quickly as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain't lookin'.”
-
“Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
-
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
-
“In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda.”
-
“Preparation for war is a constant stimulus to suspicion and ill will.”
-
“Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism was an important, even dominant strand in U.S. politics. After the Second World War, this strand disappeared, smothered by the widespread and bipartisan conviction that the United States needed to stay engaged with the world to prevent future crises.”
-
“We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping… If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.”
-
“All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”
-
“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.”
-
“We must not only imagine a better future for women, children, and persecuted minorities; we must work consistently to make it happen - prioritizing humanity, not war.”
-
“In the scriptures, 'peace' means either freedom from strife, contention, conflict, or war, or an inner calm and comfort born of the Spirit that is a gift of God to all of his children, an assurance and serenity within a person's heart.”
-
“The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”
-
“Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.”
-
“During the Second World War, we lived in a flat on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London. At one point during the blitz, the air-raid sirens went off every night for 30 nights, and each time, my parents would grab my sister and me and take us to the shelter beneath Whitechapel underground station.”
-
“Courage shows itself in many different ways. A soldier heading off to war, a freedom fighter giving their life, or even a nurse braving a deadly virus as she heads to work in a hospital ward every day. Sometimes, though, courage does not require the ultimate sacrifice.”
-
“That man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war.”
-
“The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.”
-
“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.”
-
“I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.”
-
“It took the Gulf War to demonstrate that America did want more than one friend in the Mideast, and also was willing to take and make major risks to prevent a small Muslim country, Kuwait, from being overrun and in effect stolen by Iraq.”
-
“I am only a child. Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be.”
-
“It's impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.”
-
“The opposite of war is not peace, it's creation.”
-
“For capitalism, war and peace are business and nothing but business.”
-
“The first thing that matters: I am a child of the eighties. I grew up in a neon wonderland of talking horses, compassionate bears, hair that didn't move in a stiff wind, and the constant threat of nuclear war.”
-
“Going through war and living is a very important process. You realize how vulnerable you are and how lucky you are to be in the right place at the right time. As a matter of fact, I have a history of luck.”
-
“The real war will never get in the books.”
-
“During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.”
-
“We were emerging from the period of war, of uniforms, of women-soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla.”
-
“I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.”
-
“An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.”
-
“In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.”
-
“Football is like war. It's about taking territory.”
-
“An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.”
-
“People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.”
-
“As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.”
-
“Study and work and work and study will keep in active exercise both the physical and mental. These two, rightly conducted, will not war against each other.”
-
“The surest way to deter adversary aggression is to fully prepare for war.”
-
“War is wrong. Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.”
-
“The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say 'I love you.' And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them.”
-
“Barack Obama commits war crimes - Somalia, Yemen. He commits war crimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to keep a spotlight on war crimes, to keep track of the innocents killed… There is a major clash.”
-
“Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.”
-
“Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift.”
-
“War of attrition, war of wills. That's what the Stanley Cup playoffs are - more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.”
-
“When the war closed, I buried the hatchet, and I won't fight now unless I'm put upon.”
-
“When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.”
-
“War's not black and white; it's gray. If you don't fight in the gray area, you're going to lose.”
-
“Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.”
-
“Either war is obsolete, or men are.”
-
“In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense.”
-
“No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.”
-
“I think sometimes we underestimate just how vulnerable Israel is on the public-relations front. That's why they spend so much money on propaganda. And that's why they panic every time they feel like they're losing the propaganda war.”
-
“During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.”
-
“So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.”
-
“When I volunteered for the draft as a 20-year-old, mischievous guy at the height of the Vietnam War, most thought I was destined to pass from this earth early!”
-
“The primary, the fundamental, the essential purpose of the United Nations is to keep peace. Everything it does which helps prevent World War III is good. Everything which does not further that goal, either directly or indirectly, is at best superfluous.”
-
“Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.”
-
“Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.”
-
“As peacemakers, we must resist all the powers of war and destruction and proclaim that peace is the divine gift offered to all who affirm life. Resistance means saying 'No' to all the forces of death, wherever they may be.”
-
“America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.”
-
“I'm not panicking, and I'm not scared, I've been through the Gulf War, the Asia crisis, and the Russian crisis.”
-
“The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.”
-
“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.”
-
“Then, after the war it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin.”
-
“I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.”
-
“Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.”
-
“Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.”
-
“I could start a war in 30 seconds. But some countries spend 100 years trying to find peace. Just like good manners, peace has to be learned.”
-
“Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.”
-
“With all the negativity going on in the world right now, people need an escape. When you give them a hit record or a great record, it allows them to escape for at least three to four minutes. They're not thinking bills or economy or immigration or war when you create that kind of ambiance.”
-
“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
-
“Politics is the womb in which war develops.”
-
“I'm a Canadian. Outside Canada I carry the flag. Canadian nationalism isn't as insidious as American nationalism, though. It's good natured. It's all about maple syrup, not war.”
-
“War Eagle' is like 'I love you.”
-
“My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”
-
“A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.”
-
“War is not cheap, but it's the human cost that's the highest.”
-
“If war comes upon us, it will come as a thief in the night.”
-
“We need to bear in mind that we don't have religious tests in this country, and we also need to remember that some of our best allies in the war against Islamic terrorism are Muslims.”
-
“My objective is to fulfil the dream of Bangabandhu through building a hunger- and poverty-free Golden Bangladesh being imbued with the spirit of the War of Liberation.”
-
“South Korea first allowed women into the military in 1950 during the Korean War. Back then, female soldiers mainly held administrative and support positions. Women began to take on combat roles in the 1990s when the three military academies, exclusive to men, began accepting women.”
-
“Everyone thinks my story should be marked by heroism, but there was no risk to myself. You see, no-one in Prague at that time thought they were going to be at war with England.”
-
“Remember this about the Korean War: The men were drafted; the women volunteered.”
-
“I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.”
-
“People are still thinking of solving problems by violence and war, and that has to stop.”
-
“Rich people never go to war. You ask a college kid to go to war, and he's like, 'Umm, I'm taking this sociology class, and I think war is, like, really stupid, and my roommate's, like, half Afghani, so it's going to cause some static.'”
-
“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
-
“Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.”
-
“This union has been divided in like a civil war - brother against brother - sister against sister. And I'm pulling it together. We've already seen evidence of that in New York, in Pennsylvania, in California. The first thing is we have to get on the same page. We have to be united in one cause.”
-
“Man, me and Biggie were the biggest artists in New York. When he passed, I was so messed up. My attitude was messed up about him dying. There was an East-West thing back then, and I was in war mode.”
-
“In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.”
-
“War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.”
-
“When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.”
-
“You could say that bad typography brought us the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the housing crisis and a good number of other things.”
-
“How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime?”
-
“Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable. Disposable in war; disposable in work. We need warriors and volunteer firefighters, so we label these men heroes.”
-
“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”
-
“Peace is obtained by war.”
-
“You can propose marriage naked or in handcuffs, but no one is going to agree to forsake all others for a man in shorts. You can't declare war in shorts or deliver a eulogy in shorts.”
-
“Thus, it was to seek true civilization and true justice for all the peoples of the world, and to view this as the destruction of personal freedom and respect is to be assailed by the hatred and emotion of war, and to make hasty judgments.”
-
“What the American people want to do is fight a war without getting hurt. You can't do that any more than you can get into a barroom fight without getting hurt… Unless the American people are willing to send their sons out to fight an aggressor, there just isn't going to be any United States.”
-
“When the women's liberation movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, at the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe in the basic principles of any of those philosophies.”
-
“'Matterhorn' is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.”
-
“The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.”
-
“We owe our World War II veterans - and all our veterans - a debt we can never fully repay.”
-
“There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.”
-
“Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.”
-
“Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war.”
-
“Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.”
-
“Religion is a complex and often contradictory force in our world. It fosters hope and comfort but also doubt and guilt. It creates both community and exclusion. It brings societies together around shared belief and tears them apart through war. However, what unites the faithful, whatever their religion, is the unshakeable force of generosity.”
-
“The war is not planned. I don't believe that any responsible person plans it. But it's thought as possible.”
-
“The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.”
-
“Nothing is more precious than peace, by which all war, both in Heaven and Earth, is brought to an end.”
-
“What happens in the context of war is that, in order for you to make a child into a killer, you destroy everything that they know, which is what happened to me and my town. My family was killed, all of my family, so I had nothing.”
-
“Peace is the happy natural state of man; war is corruption and disgrace.”
-
“When I was researching my book 'The 33 Strategies of War', I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.”
-
“I do not want war. I am not seeking revenge, even though I can see before my eyes the great sacrifices made by the Ukrainian people. I am seeking peace and will achieve Ukraine's unity.”
-
“What is compelling with 'War Horse' is the jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring craftsmanship in this movie.”
-
“The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.”
-
“You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.”
-
“I grew up in a family full of strong women. A great aunt on my mother's side had been a matron on a hospital ship in World War II, and one on my father's side had served in the Women's Royal Naval Service.”
-
“Syrians need to prepare for the aftermath if the Assad regime falls. Atrocities that could be considered war crimes have been committed in this country, and Syrians should rightly demand that the perpetrators be held accountable.”
-
“When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.”
-
“My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.”
-
“Alfred Nobel's discoveries are characteristic; powerful explosives can help men perform admirable tasks. They are also a means to terrible destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead peoples to war.”
-
“War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.”
-
“Because my father was an army officer, I was told to enter the military school during the war. Luckily or unluckily, one month before the entrance examination, I got polio, which made my right arm numb. It's still numb.”
-
“Baneful indeed is the scourge of war.”
-
“Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.”
-
“There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”
-
“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.”
-
“I've always been a Civil War buff. In fact, the ships that always fascinated me the most were the ironclads, because they were the start of an era.”
-
“I think it is fair to say that during World War II there was a high sense of purpose. The country had a very clear vision of its own standing, of its own morality. It was not an ambiguous time. Today, we live in a world that is highly ambiguous, very fractured, with many of the historical, traditional values in a state of collapse, really.”
-
“The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can't win a war if you haven't.”
-
“The war on drugs is a war against the communities.”
-
“There's not going to be a World War III, because there is no one to have World War III with.”
-
“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”
-
“Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that counts.”
-
“As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.”
-
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”
-
“I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them.”
-
“It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.”
-
“The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture 'War' with 'Terror' in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without 'legitimate authority' to wage war.”
-
“The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.”
-
“February 19, 1942, is the year in which Executive Order 9066 was signed, and this was the order that called for the exclusion and internment of all Japanese Americans living on the west coast during World War II.”
-
“I need eight weeks, train hard, last one week make weight, and go to the war. Because when I go to the war, I have to know I am ready or no.”
-
“War is a blessing compared with national degradation.”
-
“There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.”
-
“No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets' view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.”
-
“I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.”
-
“You ask me if I will not be glad when the last battle is fought, so far as the country is concerned I, of course, must wish for peace, and will be glad when the war is ended, but if I answer for myself alone, I must say that I shall regret to see the war end.”
-
“I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command.”
-
“I'm a New Yorker, originally. I was raised in Jackson Heights. I went to P.S. 148 and then Newtown High School. If World War II didn't come, I'd still be there in school. World War II saved me.”
-
“We need to stop spending money on death, the war in Iraq and on enhancing the lives of the people in our own country.”
-
“During the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, Britain was rampantly jingoistic: anyone who opposed the war was cast as a traitor. The 'Guardian' stood against it and ran a campaign for peace while the brilliant 'Guardian' reporter Emily Hobhouse exposed the concentration camps for the Boers run by the British.”
-
“The War has been waged with success, although there have been in some instances errors and misfortunes. But the heart of the nation is sounder and its hopes brighter.”
-
“Rock 'n' roll was two pegs below being a prisoner of war back then.”
-
“Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.”
-
“The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.”
-
“Avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward.”
-
“The use of drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. On the battlefield, a squad leader can receive real-time data from a drone that enables him to view the landscape for miles in every direction, dramatically expanding the capabilities of what would normally have been a small and isolated unit.”
-
“I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.”
-
“I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.”
-
“Believe me, it is much harder to make peace than war.”
-
“I would trade 20 white babies for an Asian baby. If I'm ever rich, I want a closet full of Asian babies. And I'll just pull them out whenever I'm feeling down, you know? All kinds. Korean ones. Chinese ones. Vietnamese - not so much. My dad was in the war, and I hold a grudge.”
-
“The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.”
-
“Even a war zone looks peaceful in most places, most of the time.”
-
“The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.”
-
“The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.”
-
“I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.”
-
“Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.”
-
“I come from - I came from Wales, and it's a strong, butch society. We were in the war and all that. People didn't waste time feeling sorry for themselves. You had to get on with it. So my credo is get on with it. I don't waste time being soft. I'm not cold, but I don't like being, wasting my time with - life's too short.”
-
“The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.”
-
“When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.”
-
“I think if we understand better the impact of war on women and children, we might be more careful about the wars we start.”
-
“War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
-
“At every election, my vote goes to the candidate less likely to declare war. You're dropping hugely expensive pieces of exploding metal on a population. America deserves the president it gets, whether the country votes for them or allows their vote to be stolen, and the least we can do is to elect someone who won't do that to other people.”
-
“War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.”
-
“A war can perhaps be won single-handedly. But peace - lasting peace - cannot be secured without the support of all.”
-
“Islamism is a monstrous totalitarian ideology that has declared war on our nation, on reason, on civilization.”
-
“The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people.”
-
“Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives; we of Macedon for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men, and they are slaves.”
-
“No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.”
-
“We need to learn… how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.”
-
“I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war.”
-
“Money should be for ponies, not for war, I think.”
-
“We're going through a kind of ancient, barbaric war dance now - it's almost an ultimate in absurdity.”
-
“My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.”
-
“I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent.”
-
“The brave men die in war. It takes great luck or judgment not to be killed. Once, at least, the head has to bow and the knee has to bend to danger. The soldiers who march back under the triumphal arches are death's deserters.”
-
“War is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men.”
-
“War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.”
-
“We are unnecessarily wasting our precious resources in wars… if we must wage war, we have to do it on unemployment, disease, poverty, and backwardness.”
-
“Every year, I hear about Thanksgiving. Who do one give thanks to? … And who is giving thanks? What are they giving thanks for? For lots of poverty that's on the earth and lots of war that is a-rumoring all over the earth? For lots of people who die daily and the crime that multiply?”
-
“I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.”
-
“My child, you are going to be a great king; do not imitate me in the taste I have had for building, or in that I have had for war; try, on the contrary, to be at peace with your neighbors.”
-
“The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.”
-
“I met Heinlein after 'The Forever War' had won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He shook my hand and said he loved the book so much, he'd read it three times.”
-
“I'm a writer. I don't support any war. That's my principle.”
-
“People try to glorify war, particularly those who aren't actually fighting in them. People tend to make heroes of those who are fighting in them.”
-
“There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.”
-
“Poland is ready to admit every refugee who arrives in Poland, fleeing the war in the Middle East, no matter their faith or economic status, provided that they comply with our legal regulations and want to stay in our country.”
-
“No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.”
-
“Unless and until something concrete is done about addressing the Israeli-Palestinian issue you won't get a real start on the war against terrorism.”
-
“I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.”
-
“Competition makes things come out right. Well, what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute, let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war.”
-
“War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.”
-
“My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.”
-
“I was in high school and 9/11 happened. My boyfriend joined the army and I was extremely disgusted with this war fervour.”
-
“One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.”
-
“It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken.”
-
“To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.”
-
“In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.”
-
“My attitude to peace is rather based on the Burmese definition of peace - it really means removing all the negative factors that destroy peace in this world. So peace does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war, but to all other factors that threaten peace, such as discrimination, such as inequality, poverty.”
-
“We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.”
-
“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.”
-
“Human beings of today are more fragile, whereas people born in wartime, during the Second World War, eventually became the great players like Pele. They were fantastic players.”
-
“Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.”
-
“If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.”
-
“Sports is like a war without the killing.”
-
“Everybody knows that love is better than hate, and peace is better than war.”
-
“We've killed a million Iraqis since the start of the Gulf war - mostly by blocking humanitarian aid.”
-
“Both the 'Gregor' series and 'The Hunger Games' are what I call lightning-bolt ideas. There was a moment where the idea came to me. With 'The Hunger Games,' the lightning bolt sort of hit at a moment when I was channel surfing between reality TV and the coverage of the Iraq war.”
-
“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.”
-
“Women don't go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.”
-
“I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it's a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.”
-
“In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.”
-
“We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II.”
-
“Most people are remarkably resilient. Even those who have been through war or great loss often find reservoirs of strength. But the legacy of trauma is a heavy burden to bear.”
-
“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.”
-
“As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived.”
-
“Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.”
-
“War hath no fury like a non-combatant.”
-
“I've seen terrorism close up, but I don't live in a state of terror at all. I'm comfortable going to the Manhattan Thanksgiving Day Parade, the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, Times Square on New Years Eve. For perspective, the world today is a safer place than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, World War II.”
-
“To many men… the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.”
-
“No one hates war like a soldier hates war.”
-
“Human nature must be changed if we are ever to have an end to war or to correct the wrong situations that make our lives uneasy and our hearts sore. Now Christianity, the power of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit of God, is the only force that can change people for good.”
-
“In war there is no prize for runner-up.”
-
“World War II brought the Greatest Generation together. Vietnam tore the Baby Boomers apart.”
-
“In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital.”
-
“My father, a Vietnam War pilot, used to tell me that the only really bad decisions are the ones you stick to even when you get facts that support a change in the mission.”
-
“A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.”
-
“The people who are sending our men and women in uniform into conflict need to understand that there are some things worth fighting for, but also understand the high cost of war.”
-
“In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.”
-
“In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.”
-
“That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.”
-
“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.”
-
“All through the years since World War II, the Japanese people have, I am convinced, made strenuous efforts to preserve and promote world peace, contributing to the progress and prosperity of mankind.”
-
“It's an important fact of life, war.”
-
“What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.”
-
“During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.”
-
“What shall I say further? Shall I not stop short and leave to your imaginations to portray the tragic deeds of war? Is it not enough that I here leave it even to unexperience to fancy the hardships, the anxieties, the dangers, even of the best life of a soldier?”
-
“When this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac.”
-
“Governments go to war directly or by proxy without declaring war. Force, or threat of force, are constantly used to dominate other countries.”
-
“I'm a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.”
-
“I think the War on Terror has succeeded in creating more terror, more terrorists, a less safe America, and a less safe world.”
-
“But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.”
-
“We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”
-
“Five million Jews are regarding me as a traitor, but six billion people around the world think me as a hero and a good man who bring the message to all the human beings that we should survive and prevent the use of nuclear weapons and to prevent the nuclear preparations and to prevent nuclear war in the future.”
-
“In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.”
-
“Quickness is the essence of the war.”
-
“Americans are blessed with great plenty; we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine.”
-
“The heroes of Flight 93 won the first battle in the War on Terror, and they should never be forgotten.”
-
“If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”
-
“If our countries had war the one with the other, that was no cause that he should put us to death; with which they were out of heart that their cruel pretense failed them. For which God be forever-more praised.”
-
“War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.”
-
“Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.”
-
“I have entered the field to die, if need be, for this government, and never expect to return to peaceful pursuits until the object of this war of preservation has become a fact established.”
-
“'War and Peace' may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being.”
-
“It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.”
-
“Too often, U.N. peacekeepers face an impossible task in countries that are still at war and where there is no real peace to keep.”
-
“Iraq made commitments after the Gulf War to completely dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, and unfortunately, Iraq has not lived up to its agreement.”
-
“World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.”
-
“I would like to see an end to war, poverty, and unnecessary human suffering. But I can't see it in a monetary-based system where the richest nations control most of the world's resources.”
-
“What we can afford least is to define the problem of future war as we would like it to be and, by doing so, introduce into our defense vulnerabilities based on self-delusion.”
-
“When the war was over and the guys were back to shaving every day, the editor thought the Beetle Bailey strips were hurting their disciplinary efforts to get the guys back to routine.”
-
“I believe that in the end the abolition of war, the maintenance of world peace, the adjustment of international questions by pacific means will come through the force of public opinion, which controls nations and peoples.”
-
“I believe in both my right and my responsibility to work to create a world that doesn't glorify violence and war but where we seek different solutions to our common problems.”
-
“War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good… war sucks.”
-
“There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done.”
-
“Even I had no opportunity to conduct very many concerts after World War II.”
-
“At some point we must stop being paranoid and believing that we are all at war.”
-
“There is no glory in war, yet from the blackness of its history, there emerge vivid colours of human character and courage. Those who risked their lives to help their friends.”
-
“Female service members are so integrated into the military, so critical and vital to all functions of the military, from combat service support to combat support, to direct combat, that we could not go to war as a nation - we could not defend America - without our women.”
-
“I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.”
-
“The War Powers Act requires presidents to seek the consent of the American people, through their representatives, before sending our troops into war. It is the responsibility of Congress to deliberate and consult with the executive branch before involving ourselves in a military conflict.”
-
“I knew that the Hague Convention prohibited the use of poison in war. I didn't know the details of the terms of the Convention, but I did know of that prohibition.”
-
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.”
-
“I don't think a lot of the news outlets examine the effect of war on a family.”
-
“You must all be aware that modern war is not a mere matter of military operations. It involves the whole strength and all the resources of the nation. Not only soldiers, but also all citizens without exception, take part.”
-
“God bless and help all the victims and patriots of 9/11, from the families of Flight 93 passengers to those who were in the Pentagon and Twin Towers as well as others who have fought and presently fight the war on terror.”
-
“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.”
-
“With our Reserve and Guard units playing increasingly important roles in the war on terror and in Iraq, it is unacceptable to make them jump through any unnecessary hurdles.”
-
“It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”
-
“Working on 'The War Room' was a thrill, not only because we were given such exquisite access to the nerve center of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, but for me personally, it was so exciting to be producing my first film and working with documentary filmmaking legends D.A. Pannebaker and Chris Hegedus, who were the film's directors.”
-
“I want to wage war against illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, unfair competition, communitarianism, delinquency.”
-
“What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.”
-
“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”
-
“The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.”
-
“Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.”
-
“If it's just screaming - and I know this sounds so ridiculous - that gets old. But sometimes when there's literal chaos, it's like being in a war zone, and that's kind of exciting. You're just running through the crowd of people chasing after you and no one knows what's going on.”
-
“The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.”
-
“I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn't there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope.”
-
“If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.”
-
“It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.”
-
“I like metal detecting, collecting Civil War artifacts, fishing, hunting, cigars, Labradors, the outdoor life, my baseball game, football.”
-
“The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”
-
“In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939.”
-
“A peace that depends on fear is nothing but a suppressed war.”
-
“I entered the navy with the great ambition of becoming a naval soldier and going to war. Either I die from this festering wound - because I refuse to have my arm amputated - or I recover from it and continue being a soldier. I have a one-in-two chance, and I shall bet my life on it!”
-
“When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.”
-
“President George H.W. Bush was a patriot who served our country in World War II, lead the CIA, an Ambassador to the United Nations, was the Vice President and the Commander and Chief who oversaw the end of the Cold War and successfully led our troops through the Gulf War.”
-
“I ended the war a horse ahead.”
-
“I can tell you this: If I'm ever in a position to call the shots, I'm not going to rush to send somebody else's kids into a war.”
-
“If you support the war on drugs in its present form, then you're only paying lip-service to the defense of freedom, and you don't really grasp the concept of the sovereign individual human being.”
-
“I have my three brothers, and then I have my adopted sister from El Salvador, who is actually the oldest. My brother and I were already born, and then my parents adopted my sister from El Salvador during the war and had two more kids.”
-
“What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.”
-
“What I am going to tell you is this: Although it is commonly believed that the War on Terrorism is a noble effort to defend freedom, in reality, it has little to do with terrorism and even less to do with the defense of freedom.”
-
“When you go out on to that field it's going to be war. Sportsmanship is playing to the best of your abilities and then, afterwards, shaking your opponent's hand.”
-
“To me, all war is failure for humanity, though it often is a bounty for commerce.”
-
“When I was born in 1942, World War II was still going. And I began to realize when I became a young adult that if we don't teach our kids a better way of relating to their fellow human beings, the very future of humanity on the planet is in jeopardy.”
-
“We must fight for peace bravely as we fought in war.”
-
“During my years in the Navy and in the White House, I was involved in assessing how a war with Iran would go. In summary: It would be ugly.”
-
“To secure peace is to prepare for war.”
-
“Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.”
-
“People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for 'War Horse.' Well, there's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced - but it was definitely challenging at times.”
-
“Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.”
-
“Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.”
-
“We experienced similar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.”
-
“This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty.”
-
“After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it's worse than ever.”
-
“My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.”
-
“During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.”
-
“Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.”
-
“The whole point of being in the Army is wanting to get killed, wanting to test yourself to the limits. Now you have to fly 15,000ft above the war zone to avoid getting hit. I don't think there is any point in having wars if that's how you're going to behave. It's pathetic. All this whining!”
-
“When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.”
-
“If there ever was a religious war full of terror, it was the crusades. But you can't blame Christianity because a few adventurers did this. That's my message.”
-
“The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.”
-
“I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.”
-
“War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.”
-
“Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.”
-
“A war is a horrible thing, but it's also a unifier of countries.”
-
“Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920's and 1930's when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother's keeper.”
-
“Baseball is only a game, a game of inches and a lot of luck. During a time of all-out war, sports are very insignificant.”
-
“The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars - all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.”
-
“The way that Trump spoke about the outside world was the most aggressive, most hyper-nationalist, and in some ways most hostile of any inaugural address I think since the Second World War.”
-
“The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.”
-
“Ukraine has been a strong partner to the United States on international initiatives and a committed ally in fighting the War on Terrorism.”
-
“I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.”
-
“Those men who, in war, seek to preserve their lives at any rate commonly die with shame and ignominy, while those who look upon death as common to all, and unavoidable, and are only solicitous to die with honour, oftener arrive at old age and, while they live, live happier.”
-
“So I would say God hates war, but God loves every soldier.”
-
“One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear - the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don't think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.”
-
“War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.”
-
“Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.”
-
“We… our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.”
-
“Accursed be he that first invented war.”
-
“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.”
-
“With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.”
-
“In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.”
-
“When I was a young man, I was poor. In a war with other nations, I was in eighty-seven fights. There I received my name and was made Chief of my nation. But now I am old and am for peace.”
-
“It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.”
-
“From the point of the view of the nation's power, it was obvious that while we were fighting the Sino-Japanese war, every effort was to be made to avoid adding to our enemies and opening additional fronts.”
-
“The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.”
-
“Religion is interesting because it brings out the best and the worst in humanity. It can be a source of good deeds, whether it's people from different spiritual backgrounds coming together to help other people in need after a crisis. But it's also a cause for war and bloodshed.”
-
“Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.”
-
“George H. W. Bush may be a World War II hero and New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother.”
-
“You have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity.”
-
“The war on drugs is very, very real, and the war on helping people with mental illness is very, very real.”
-
“Al Jazeera aired a new tape of Osama bin Laden. It was the usual stuff, he called Bush evil, the Great Satan, called him a war monger. Basically, the same thing you heard at last night's Democratic debate.”
-
“We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.”
-
“'Dare to Discipline' was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed.”
-
“The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.”
-
“The American psyche has not recovered, and likely will not ever fully recover, from the profound and relentless incompetence of George W. Bush's disastrous, multitrillion-dollar war.”
-
“Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.”
-
“From its inception, South Vietnam was only considered to be an outpost in the war against communism.”
-
“The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”
-
“Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”
-
“A war between Europeans is a civil war.”
-
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
-
“In war there is no substitute for victory.”
-
“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.”
-
“The German physicists knew at least so much about the manufacture and construction of atomic bombs that it was clear to them that the manufacture of bombs in Germany could not succeed during the war. For this reason, they were spared the moral decision whether they should make an atomic bomb, and they had only worked on the uranium engine.”
-
“Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.”
-
“War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”
-
“Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
-
“America means far more than a continent bounded by two oceans. It is more than pride of military power, glory in war, or in victory. It means more than vast expanse of farms, of great factories or mines, magnificent cities, or millions of automobiles and radios.”
-
“When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.”
-
“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.”
-
“Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.”
-
“That most unfortunate war, which I deeply deplore.”
-
“This was not an act of terrorism, but it was an act of war.”
-
“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.”
-
“Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.”
-
“It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.”
-
“Laws are silent in time of war.”
-
“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.”
-
“No war is inevitable until it breaks out.”
-
“If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.”
-
“Only the man who disciplines himself strictly can stand for long the terrific pace of modern war.”
-
“War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.”
-
“I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.”
-
“Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.”
-
“Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.”
-
“Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.”
-
“There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.”
-
“I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.”
-
“War is a profane thing.”
-
“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.”
-
“If you use weapons of war to bring about peace, you're going to have more war and destruction.”
-
“I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”
-
“In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.”
-
“War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.”
-
“In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflict stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering.”
-
“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”
-
“In 'The Hunger Games,' in most people's idea, in terms of rebellion or a civil-war situation, that would meet the criteria for a necessary war. These people are oppressed, their children are being taken off and put in gladiator games. They're impoverished, they're starving, they're brutalized.”
-
“Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.”
-
“The Cold War, Bosnia and Ukraine remind us that peace is fragile. Iraq and Syria remind us that no society or culture is immune from conflict.”
-
“A great war shall burst forth from fishes of steel. Machines of flying fire, lobsters, grasshoppers, mosquitoes. The mass attacks shall be repulsed in the woods, when no child in Germany shall obey any longer.”
-
“Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.”
-
“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.”
-
“War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.”
-
“Here's how I think of my money - as soldiers - I send them out to war everyday. I want them to take prisoners and come home, so there's more of them.”
-
“After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.”
-
“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.”
-
“My parents fled from North Korea during the Korean War because they despised the North Korean Communist regime. They fled to seek freedom and came to South Korea.”
-
“In the '60s we fought for peace, when the Vietnam war was on. We were against the cops and against the politicians, and there was a lot of waving banners and all that. And I think in a way, just as they were enjoying that machoism of war, we were enjoying the machismo of being anti-war, you know?”
-
“Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.”
-
“We were succeeding. When you looked at specifics, this became a war of attrition. We were winning.”
-
“If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.”
-
“The people who were against the Vietnam War thought I was attacking the Army. The guys in the Army thought I was representing their experiences. I was on both sides, and I survived.”
-
“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.”
-
“An honorable Peace is and always was my first wish! I can take no delight in the effusion of human Blood; but, if this War should continue, I wish to have the most active part in it.”
-
“War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.”
-
“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.”
-
“The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.”
-
“War is a contagion.”
-
“The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.”
-
“Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.”
-
“If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.”
-
“As long as tides of war are in our favor, the United States will never stop fighting. As a consequence, the war will continue for several years, during which materiel will be exhausted, vessels and arms will be damaged, and they can be replaced only with great difficulties.”
-
“War - An act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.”
-
“One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.”
-
“There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.”
-
“The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”
-
“Each time a new war is disclosed in the name of the fight of the good against evil, those who are killed are all poor. It's always the same story repeating once and again and again.”
-
“Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
-
“Nullification means insurrection and war; and the other states have a right to put it down.”
-
“Ever since the end of the Cold War, it has been our paramount interest in Europe to strengthen NATO and to extend it - an effort I was part of when I served in the State Department and the NSC in two administrations.”
-
“Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy.”
-
“I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.”
-
“I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.”
-
“American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.”
-
“We have judicial system in Sudan. Anyone who committed a war crime, anti-human crime, or any other crime will be locked up.”
-
“I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.”
-
“How is it they live in such harmony the billions of stars - when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds about someone they know.”
-
“War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”
-
“As a Korean War veteran, I know firsthand and understand the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform.”
-
“God has been pleased to save us during the years of war that have already passed. We pray that He may be pleased to save us to the end. But we must do our part.”
-
“What they could do with 'round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization.”
-
“War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.”
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“The Holocaust only emerged in American life after Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day war against its Arab neighbours.”
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“Morality is contraband in war.”
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“I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.”
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“A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.”
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“This gulf war syndrome thing is truly unfortunate, and I've met some of the vets who have this. These are my guys, and I feel terrible about it.”
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“I lost a great uncle in World War II who was with the Royal Canadian Air Force.”
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“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”
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“People say you favor assassination, what do you think war is? Except that it's assassination on a much larger scale, a much more horrific scale.”
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“The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.”
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“War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.”
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“Generally, the view that I've had on Twitter is if you're on Twitter, you're in, like, the meme - you're in meme war land. If you're on Twitter, you're in the arena. And so, essentially, if you attack me, it is therefore OK for me to attack back.”
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“War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.”
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“If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.”
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“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.”
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“I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it.”
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“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people's powers of resistance.”
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“When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.”
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“It is our Party's unshakeable stand to prevent a new war from breaking out on the Korean peninsula and accelerate economic construction in a peaceful environment, thus resolving at an early date the problems related with the people's livelihood.”
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“The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble.”
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“The main American naval forces were shifted to the Pacific region and an American admiral made a strong declaration to the effect that if war were to break out between Japan and the United States, the Japanese navy could be sunk in a matter of weeks.”
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“For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.”
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“War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.”
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“I served in World War II in our fight to defeat fascism.”
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“The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: 'The Great Loot.'”
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“Now, myself, I'm not a pacifist at all. I believe in just war. I would have joined the spirit of the nation to fight against apartheid.”
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“Religion often is misused for purely power-political goals, including war.”
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“One can go to war alone, but you can't build peace alone.”
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“Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.”
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“However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account.”
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“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.”
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“The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.”
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“You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.”
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“I was in World War II; I cried when they took me in the Navy. That's the last time I cried.”
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“I assure you, Ladies and Gentlemen, that we shall discover ourselves in peace more than we have with war and confrontation, as I am sure that the Israelis, in turn shall find themselves in peace more than they have found it in war.”
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“The eight-year-long Algerian war was to bring down six French prime ministers, open the door to de Gaulle - and come close to destroying him, too. The war was the last of the grand-style colonial struggles, but, perhaps more to the point, it was also the first campaign in which poorly equipped Muslim mujahedin licked one of the top Western armies.”
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“We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.”
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“Cyber war takes place largely in secret, unknown to the general public on both sides.”
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“Ukraine and Israel have long-standing historical ties. Our nations have together experienced all the tragedies in recent history - the Holodomor and the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the totalitarian Soviet regime.”
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“War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.”
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“Perhaps if all the peoples of the world understand what war really means, we would eliminate it.”
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“By the last returns to the Department of War the militia force of the several States may be estimated at 800,000 men - infantry, artillery, and cavalry.”
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“I grew up in war and saw the United Nations help my country to recover and rebuild. That experience was a big part of what led me to pursue a career in public service. As Secretary-General, I am determined to see this organization deliver tangible, meaningful results that advance peace, development and human rights.”
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“The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein's army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam's troops killed thousands - Iraqis say tens of thousands - in a counter-offensive.”
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“In Japan, after having lost World War II, the hierarchy that used to exist in the society, from the rich to the poor, has been flattened, especially by the winners, by Americans. As a Japanese artist debuting in America, I really had to bring that kind of theme into the work.”
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“I have never before, in my long and eclectic career, been gifted with such an abundance of natural beauty as I experienced filming 'War Horse' on Dartmoor.”
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“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.”
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“The lunacy continues and has every chance of becoming a way of life unless we stop it soon. Men are getting so used to wars that the psychiatric wing of the RAMC are planning how to break the news to the men when the war is over.”
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“I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.”
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“War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.”
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“The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.”
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“When my elders mentioned 'The War,' they invariably meant that of 1914-1918, even after 1939, for the Second World War was merely the continuation of the first, 'an armistice of 20 years,' as Marshal Foch had accurately predicted at the Versailles Peace Conference, with some changes of side.”
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“People asked me during the Iraq war if I was afraid to speak out. I said no.”
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“Let him who desires peace prepare for war.”
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“Guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by the few but dependent on the support of many.”
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“Let us wage a moral and political war against war itself, so that we can cut military spending and use that money for human needs.”
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“The men and women on the front lines of the war on terror continue to risk their lives to save ours - and for that we owe them a debt that we can never truly repay. Thanks to their efforts we have made tremendous progress. Yet, the job is not done.”
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“A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.”
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“Directing plays lacked the immediacy and connection to real world events that journalism offered; journalism lacked the drama, theatricality and subjective storytelling of theater. It wasn't until I had the idea of making a documentary film about the 1992 presidential campaign that these two passions came together in 'The War Room.'”
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“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.”
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“I hope my own children never have to fight a war.”
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“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”
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“A siege is an act of war.”
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“War means fighting, and fighting means killing.”
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“War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.”
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“The U.S. military was segregated 'til the Korean War, and the blacks in World War Two were totally segregated.”
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“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.”
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“In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.”
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“The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.”
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“It's the first war we've ever fought on the television screen and the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign.”
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“The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the 'New York Times' or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.”
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“War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.”
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“Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.”
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“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.”
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“War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.”
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“Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.”
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“I'm trying to raise the awareness of the troops that, when they deploy and go to war, it's not just them at war - it's also their family. Their family is having to go through all the hardships and the stresses.”
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“The final outcome of a war is often determined by the degree of initiative shown on each side.”
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“These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War.”
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“War is the business of barbarians.”
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“It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.”
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“When gasoline and rubber are rationed, electric power and transport facilities are becoming increasingly scarce, and manpower shortages are developing, it is difficult for people to understand their increased use for other than the most vital needs of war.”
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“Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.”
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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.”
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“War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”
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“War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.”
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“More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars - yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.”
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“I took Beetle home thinking that after the Korean War was over, I would have to take him out of the Army. I thought, well, what am I going to do with him?”
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“In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.”
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“Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn't give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor ever lose a war.”
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“When you go to war, both sides lose totally.”
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“There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.”
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“A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.”
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“In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory.”
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“If we are to have a war with America, we will have no hope of winning unless the U.S. fleet in Hawaiian waters can be destroyed.”
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“Only one thing can conquer war - that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.”
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“Since the Korean War, U.S. and South Korea have established an enduring friendship with shared interests, such as denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, combating aggression abroad and developing our economies.”
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“The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.”
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“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”
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“The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.”
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“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”
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“There's a basis for the war, historically, in the 'Hunger Games,' which would be the third servile war, which was Spartacus' war, where you have a man who is a slave who is then turned into a gladiator who broke out of the gladiator school and led a rebellion and then became the face of the war.”
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“It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow… that are the aftermath of war.”
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“There's many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but it is all hell.”
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“My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.”
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“I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.”
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“The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”
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“War settles nothing.”
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“Throughout that period, Japan had made honest efforts to keep the destruction of war from spreading and, based on the belief that all nations of the world should find their places, had followed a policy designed to restore an expeditious peace between Japan and China.”
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“The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what's really happened.”
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“War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.”
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“My home policy: I wage war; my foreign policy: I wage war. All the time I wage war.”
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“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.”
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“When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.”
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“War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.”
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“We have practiced diplomacy since the very beginning of the nation. Sometimes it has not worked, and we've had to go to war. I always believe you should try to find peace and reconciliation before conflict. That has been the approach I've taken.”
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“War is at its best barbarism.”
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“War's a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.”
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“It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”
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“War is just a racket… I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.”
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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.”
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“In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.”
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“War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.”
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“I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.”
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“I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.”
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“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”