War Quotes

Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust Mothers of Borogravia! and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust?Very nearly everyone, come to think of it...

~ Terry Pratchett

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

~ William Faulkner

And just so you know, the invaders are always the bad guys. Always.

~ Laini Taylor

War is not nice.

~ Barbara Bush

I am a war president.

~ George W. Bush

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are important; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes trivial. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. 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.

~ Virginia Woolf

War made the state, and the state made war

~ Charles Tilly

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

~ Don Delillo

A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.

~ Robert Fulghum

War is always an adventure to those who've never seen it.

~ Anthony Ryan

War means fighting, and fighting means killing.

~ Nathan Bedford Forrest

I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!

~ Alan Alda

Love is hateWar is PeaceNo is YesAnd we're all free.

~ Tracy Chapman

When youre sharing a foxhole with another man, you don't worry about what color he is, just whether or not he will protect your back

~ Lee Benson

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

~ George Orwell

The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.

~ Adolf Hitler

I said, 'I have heard people talk about war as if it was a very fine thing.' Ah!' said [Captain], 'I should think they never saw it. No doubt it is very fine when there is no enemy, when it is just exercise and parade, and sham-fight. Yes, it is very fine then; but when thousands of good brave men and horses are killed, or crippled for life, it has a very different look.' Do you know what they fought about?' said I. No,' he said, 'that is more than a horse can understand, but the enemy must have been awfully wicked people, if it was right to go all that way over the sea on purpose to kill them.

~ Anna Sewell

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight.

~ Philip Pullman

That was the day the ancient songs of blood and war spilled from a hole in the skyAnd there was a long moment as we listened and fell silent in our griefand then one by one, we stood talland came togetherand began to sing of life and love and all that is good and trueAnd I will never forget that day when the ancient songs died because there was no one in the world to sing them.

~ Brian Andreas

In the art of war, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the approaching battles. But if you know only yourself and not the enemy, for every victory, there will also be defeat.

~ Emily Thorne

My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.

~ Ferdinand Foch

You gotta admit, it's a messed-up world when going to war is safer than staying home.

~ Paul Langan

At 8:23 there seemed every chance of a lasting alliance starting between Florin and Guilder.At 8:24 the two nations were very close to war.

~ William Goldman

I saw Oberon charge into the fray on a huge black warhorse, glamour swirling around him, and sweep a hand toward the thickest of the fighting. Vines and roots erupted from the ground, coiling around the Iron fey, strangling them or pulling them beneath the earth. Atop a rise, Mab raised her arms, and a savage whirlwind swept across the field, freezing fey solid or impaling them with ice shards. The armies of Summer and Winter howled with renewed vigor and threw themselves at the enemy.

~ Julie Kagawa

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

~ Susan Griffin

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.

~ Howard Zinn

Knowing when to fight is just as important as knowing how.

~ Terry Goodkind

If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker.

~ Albert Einstein

Bravery without forethought, causes a man to fight blindly and desperately like a mad bull.  Such an opponent, must not be encountered with brute force, but may be lured into an ambush and slain.

~ Sun Tzu

Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.

~ Mitch Albom

Do I understand, sir, that you mean the Cause for which our heroes have died is not sacred?'If you were run over by a railroad train your death wouldn’t sanctify the railroad company, would it?' asked Rhett and his voice sounded as if he were humbly seeking information.

~ Margaret Mitchell

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Wars come and go, politics endure.

~ Jacqueline Carey

The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

~ Chris Hedges

Where you are born should not dictate your potential as a human being.

~ Roméo Dallaire

Saints preserve us,' Dr. Kellen said, and squeezed Galen's shoulder. 'What have we done to our youth?

~ Jessica Day George