Great Quotes

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

~ John Adams

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.

~ Henry Kissinger

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

~ Jon Meacham

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.

~ Julius Caesar

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.

~ Che Guevara

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.

~ Louis Xiv

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

~ Martin Luther King

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.

~ Isoroku Yamamoto

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.

~ Jodie Foster

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.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

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.

~ Daniel Morgan

In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939.

~ Michael Korda

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

~ William Tecumseh Sherman

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's hegemony lasted exactly five years.

~ Gore Vidal

I think the Cold War works as a great analogy or simile for different kinds of conflict. It's funny, when you look back at it, it's one of the last times that the boundaries were clear. Now, as we see on 'Homeland,' there are no clear boundaries and enemies.

~ Matthew Rhys

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

~ Maxine Waters

The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity.

~ Jeffrey Sachs

The great object is that every man be armed.

~ Patrick Henry

The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf.

~ Nigel Hamilton

The magnificent army that fought in Desert Storm is a great army, and it still is a magnificent army today. But it was one we designed for the Cold War, and the Cold War has been over for ten years now.

~ Eric Shinseki

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

~ Lester B. Pearson

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.

~ James A. Garfield

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.

~ Albert Pike

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes... can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.

~ John F. Kennedy

It has from the beginning been carried on with as much vigor and as great care of our trade as was consistent with our safety at home and with the circumstances we were in at the beginning of the war.

~ Robert Walpole

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.

~ Peter Shaffer

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.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?

~ Henry Louis Gates

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.

~ Smedley Butler

I love 'The War Of The Roses,' especially as my husband is in it! I've often said to him it would be great to remake that with me and him in it, because then we could really get down to some serious business.

~ Catherine Zeta-Jones

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

~ John Le Carré

Standing, as I believe the United States stands for humanity and civilization, we should exercise every influence of our great country to put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence.

~ Henry Cabot Lodge

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

~ Cory Booker

My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you've got something to share.

~ Steve Harvey

Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.

~ Florence Scovel Shinn

Failure is nature's plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.

~ Napoleon Hill

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

~ John Keats

Performers should really go to the best schools, like Lady Gaga, you know, she went to NYU and had great teachers... It's best to really study your technique as much as you possibly can so you can have a long career instead of a quick one that's a failure.

~ Tony Bennett

When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on.

~ Karan Mahajan