War Quotes

I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.

~ Sarah Miller

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.

~ Carl Sagan

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.

~ Laurence Binyon

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

~ Roger Zelazny

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

~ George S. Patton Jr.

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

~ Charles Bukowski

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Attack is the secret of defense, defense is the planning of an attack.

~ Sun Tzu

All wars are sacred,” he said. “To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and the fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ’save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ’down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!

~ Margaret Mitchell

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

~ Ronald Reagan

Perhaps ... To R.A.L.Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,And I shall see that still the skies are blue,And feel one more I do not live in vain,Although bereft of you.Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet,Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,Though You have passed away.Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,And crimson roses once again be fair,And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,Although You are not there.But though kind Time may many joys renew,There is one greatest joy I shall not knowAgain, because my heart for loss of YouWas broken, long ago.

~ Vera Brittain

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.

~ T.h. White

He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

~ Sun Tzu

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.

~ George Washington

It was not well to drive men into final corners, at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.

~ Stephen Crane

War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular.

~ T.h. White

War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

~ Anthony Doerr

The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.

~ Sebastian Junger

Alek said, Do you think I'm being a fool? I think you're trying to do something good. But doing good is rarely easy, and no weapon has ever stopped a war.

~ Scott Westerfeld

When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.

~ Brian K. Vaughan

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

~ William Faulkner

Peace is such hard work. Harder than war. It takes way more effort to forgive than to kill.

~ Rae Carson

Politics is war without blood, while war is politics with blood.

~ Mao Zedong

Killing people is easier than it should be.” Dad put on his beret. “Staying alive is harder.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

You don't get it, Clary. You don't understand what it's like to live always at war, to grow up with battle and sacrifice. I guess it's not your fault. It's just how you were brought up-

~ Cassandra Clare

Let me ask you one questionIs your money that goodWill it buy you forgivenessDo you think that it couldI think you will findWhen your death takes its tollAll the money you madeWill never buy back your soul

~ Bob Dylan

You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.

~ Naomi Klein

In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?'No,' I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.

~ Stephen E. Ambrose

Some must be warriors, that others may live in peace.

~ Mercedes Lackey

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

~ George Orwell

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

~ Margaret Atwood

Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.

~ Terry Pratchett

There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.

~ Tony Benn

To a happy war!' laughter echoed with all the insane glee of an army of psychopaths.

~ Stuart Hill

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

~ Jimmy Carter

Our hearts, the war.Her body, the battlefield.

~ Rick Yancey

I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?

~ William Shakespeare