War Quotes

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

~ Seamus Heaney

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

~ John Updike

Syria may appear to be a small country, but it is just the type of entangled conflict that can lead to a world catastrophe. It does not take much imagination to see Syria as the Sarajevo of the 21st century, leading to world war.

~ Ahmed Zewail

Only World War II, which mobilized 10 million draftees, could by any stretch of the imagination be called a people's war.

~ John Gregory Dunne

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

~ Winston Churchill

In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war.

~ Arthur Henderson

War has rules, mud wrestling has rules - politics has no rules.

~ Ross Perot

At present, the most effective way of preventing war would be for statesmen to direct politics so as to support a sound nationalism. This leads to concordance between people of kindred race and languages, whereas the conquest and coercion of people of different race and language inevitably lead to new wars.

~ Ellen Key

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

~ Carl Von Clausewitz

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

~ Winston Churchill

For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.

~ Pat Buchanan

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.

~ George Will

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.

~ Maya Lin

There is a type of snobbish, pompous journalist who thinks that the only news that has any validity is war, famine, pestilence or politics. I don't come from that school.

~ Piers Morgan

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.

~ Charles B. Rangel

War is very sad and small life is pathetically fragile at times.

~ Henry Rollins

It's a sad fact that a lot of those countries who haven't been involved in the war in Iraq have taken far more responsibility for rehoming people displaced by the war than Britain has done.

~ Romola Garai

I think as an American society, when we're paying too many taxes or dealing with war, we don't want to see sad things at the movies.

~ Zoe Saldana

President Bush spent last night calling world leaders to support the war with Iraq and it is sad when the most powerful man on earth is yelling, 'I know you're there, pick up, pick up.

~ Craig Kilborn

When 'Foyle's War' ended in 2010 after seven series, I was sad but not despondent. After all, ITV had already axed the show once in 2007, then brought it back due to public demand.

~ Honeysuckle Weeks

Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.

~ H. R. Mcmaster

When are boots in the ground no longer going to have to even be people, and is that right? When does it become 'Star Wars?' When is enough enough? When do we put this time and energy into eliminating war or reasons for war instead of creating new technology to make war easier for us?

~ Michael Kelly

Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

~ Mark Hoppus

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen.

~ Edward Rutherfurd

Like many of his fellow skyjackers, 49-year-old Arthur Gates Barkley was motivated by a complicated grievance against the federal government. In 1963, the World War II veteran had been fired as a truck driver for a bakery, after one of his supervisors accused him of harassment.

~ Brendan I. Koerner

Our countries have been friends dating to the very existence of the United States. France is the only power that has never been at war with the United States.

~ Marine Le Pen

The Vietnam War was causing people to get drafted; I had received a deferment to finish my undergraduate education, and in order to continue to get a deferment, you had to go to graduate school.

~ Robert Shapiro

We learned in World War II that no single nation holds a monopoly on wisdom, morality or right to power, but that we must fight for the weak and promote democracy.

~ Joe Baca

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.

~ Stanley Kubrick

When you think of bike couriers, you think of hyper speed. They get paid by how fast they can drop stuff off. The faster you go, the more chances you take. And the more chances you take, the greater the war between cyclists and cars.

~ Dan Hill

Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

~ Ransom Riggs

The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.

~ James Madison

My court was divided between peace and war according to their various interests, but I considered only their reasons.

~ Louis Xiv

It is heroic to prepare for war with a tyrant power. Patriots will always win the admiration of mankind for daring to meet the bloodshed of battle for their country's liberty. But the patriot who is willing to go to that sacrifice will be the first to condemn the aimless and secret shedding of blood in time of peace.

~ John Boyle O'reilly

If the inner world is inundated with peace, then the nightmare of world war cannot even come into being.

~ Sri Chinmoy

I am in favor of a foreign policy that will cultivate relations of peace with all nations, and I will never give my influence, either as a private citizen or a public servant, for war, so long as it can be honorably avoided.

~ Ambrose Burnside

Everybody knows that love is better than hate, and peace is better than war.

~ Marilyn Ferguson

When the war was in progress, England and France agreed wholeheartedly with the Fourteen Points. As soon as the war was won, England, France, and Italy tried to frustrate Wilson's program because it was in conflict with their imperialist policies. As a consequence, the Peace Treaty was one of the most unequal treaties ever negotiated in history.

~ Sun Yat-Sen

Peace and not war is the father of all things.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

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?

~ Yoko Ono