War Quotes

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.

~ Ban Ki-Moon

It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. There's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action.

~ Tom Smothers

I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.

~ Noah Hawley

'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.

~ Dave Morris

War may be made by one party, but it requires two to make peace.

~ John C. Calhoun

When it comes to matters of war and peace, we must not act rashly.

~ Ariel Sharon

The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

~ A. J. P. Taylor

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ H. L. Mencken

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

~ Umberto Eco

If you use weapons of war to bring about peace, you're going to have more war and destruction.

~ Coretta Scott King

'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!

~ Harriet Tubman

If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.

~ Jean Giraudoux

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

~ Georges Clémenceau

War is terrible. There is nothing romantic about war.

~ Martin Mcguinness

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine.

~ Drew Gilpin Faust

People that spend time in a foxhole - they're never going to find that relationship anywhere else again... Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the Second World War vets - more than even the Vietnam vets - there's a brotherhood.

~ Sylvester Stallone

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.

~ George Packer

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

~ Donald Hall

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

~ James Fenton

Yesterday, we fought wars which destroyed cities. Today, we are concerned with avoiding a war which will destroy the earth. We can adapt atomic energy to produce electricity and move ships, but can we control its use in anger?

~ Robert Kennedy

Democracies are slow to anger and hesitant to go to war: Voters don't want to sacrifice their children for the glory of a selfish king.

~ Michio Kaku

I always tell people, anger is like liquid. It's fluid, it's like water. You put it in a container and it takes the shape of that container. So many people you see in prison, unleashing war on their people, they are angry, and they take their anger and put it into a violent container.

~ Leymah Gbowee

Tragically, the effort to make America and the world safer and to defend freedom around the world is not without an enormous cost to this Nation in terms primarily of lost lives and those who bear the scars and the wounds of war, and their families who must bear these losses.

~ John Warner

David - the man after God's own heart - was a man of war and a mighty man of valour. When all Israel were on the run, David faced Goliath - alone... with God - and he but a stripling, and well scolded, too, by his brother for having come to see the battle.

~ Charles Studd

The environmental movement doesn't have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually, there will be open war.

~ Paul Watson

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

~ Noam Chomsky

Again, in Wag the Dog, war has to be declared by an act of congress. But if you go to war, you don't have to declare war. You're just at war and we did that, which is not legal.

~ Val Kilmer

For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the 'Global War on Terror.'

~ Alex Gibney

I really am not going to get involved in a discussion about the legal position of the Iraq war. I am not the person to do that because I am not sufficiently impartial as a lawyer about this, because it's a matter that is of interest to the person that I am closest to in the world.

~ Cherie Blair

Perhaps these Ten Commandments cases will be the turning point in the legal war against religion.

~ Cliff Stearns

Under well-settled legal principles, lethal force against a valid military objective, in an armed conflict, is consistent with the law of war and does not, by definition, constitute an 'assassination.'

~ Jeh Johnson

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

~ John Yoo

While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the conventions, they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.

~ John Yoo

So my own suspicion is that the attorney has stopped this prosecution because part of her defence was to question legality and that would have brought his advice into the public domain again and there was something fishy about the way in which he said war was legal.

~ Clare Short

The lesson of Pearl Harbor ought never to be forgotten, and of course the motto that came from that, 69 years ago, the war which my dad fought, was 'Remember Pearl Harbor, never again.' We need to keep that to mind.

~ Oliver North

Boxing's in my genes. I come from a fighting background. My dad and both my uncles were good boxers. I'm blessed with the art of war.

~ Floyd Mayweather

My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from the First World War.

~ Clint Eastwood

Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.

~ Ridley Scott

My dad always told me that the principal reason he chose New Zealand to emigrate to after World War II was the high regard his father had for the Kiwis he encountered at Gallipoli.

~ Peter Jackson