War Quotes

A common and natural result of an undue respect of law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.

~ Henry David Thoreau

That’s the thing about the collapse of civilization, Blake. It never happens according to plan – there’s no slavering horde of zombies. No actinic flash of thermonuclear war. No Earth-shuddering asteroid. The end comes in unforeseen ways; the stock market collapses, and then the banks, and then there is no food in the supermarkets, or the communications system goes down completely and inevitably, and previously amiable co-workers find themselves wrestling over the last remaining cookie that someone brought in before all the madness began.

~ Mark A. Rayner

I vow to ingest only items that preserve well-being, peace, and joy in my body and my consciousness... Practicing a diet is the essence of this precept. Wars and bombs are the products of our consciousness individually and collectively. Our collective consciousness has so much violence, fear, craving, and hatred in it, it can manifest in wars and bombs. The bombs are the product of our fear... Removing the bombs is not enough. Even if we could transport all the bombs to a distant planet, we would still not be safe, because the roots of the wars and the bombs are still intact in our collective consciousness. Transforming the toxins in our collective consciousness is the true way to uproot war (72-73).

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The marine corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not, he will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that marine: he has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier, or swabbie, or desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell.

~ Steven Pressfield

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

~ John Fowles

Do you have still the dye with which to turn your tunic red?’‘The madder? Yes, I do.’‘Enough of it for a century?’‘Enough for the entire cohort, if you want it.’He twitched a smile then; I was coming to know it, and to revel in the sight of it. I was his then, part of the XIIth, and he knew it.‘Not the entire cohort yet, Demalion. The century will do. Henceforth we are the Bloody First. And I fancy we might have a mule’s tail on our standard. See to it on our return.

~ M.c. Scott

The Arts are the only acceptable theatre of war for peace.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Yet if he had been asked… if he were happy… He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and venomous; that his clothes were in rags, and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about.

~ C.s. Forester

The threat of war hung on the air like a thick fog and it blinded him until he could see nothing beyond the haze. Even the stars grew faint.

~ Brian A. Mcbride

It takes skill to win a battle, but brains to win a war.

~ Amy I. Long

I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I’ll watch for that book.

~ J.d. Salinger

God does not care where you pray. He only cares what is in your heart.

~ Tucker Elliot

What are the chances that of all 1.59629 quadrillion square feet of physical land on planet Earth, three major world religions are literally fighting over one single rock?

~ Jared Brock

In Malta, the Wars of Religion reached their climax. If both sides believed that they saw Paradise in the bright sky above them, they had a close and very intimate knowledge of Hell.

~ Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford

People have been fighting and dying over religion for thousands of years. I could understand that fear. It creeps up on you a bit more when you’re alone in a foreign land. You certainly worry about it more when you walk the same streets as violent people that harbor a clear hatred of your beliefs and values. The reality is some Muslims in the world would kill me for being Christian, just as some Christians in the world would kill Maya, Gita, Farid and Ridwan for being Muslim. Nowadays news outlets and social media have reified that fear. It keeps some people focused and aware. It paralyzes others. It blinds some of us. That’s what happened to me. It’s why I felt the whole world shake. Twice.

~ Tucker Elliot

I’d like to sit there,” I said softly to the girl sitting in front of the other mirror. She scampered. I took over her abandoned make-up and painted my face. Red cheeks, to attract hungry vampyre glances. Black liquid eyeliner and mascara, to draw attention away from my bitter eyes. My silky-thin, raven hair, undone in waves over my bare shoulders. The magenta shade of apple gloss on my lips, to make them plump and inviting. Finally, a strapless golden dress that hugged my hips and not much lower. I stood up, feeling the cold air slide down the bare skin of my back like fingers, and panicked. I couldn’t wear something like this! Not without a cardigan! A light dress jacket, at least!I took a gulp of Amrit’s wine and detached myself from the fretting child in my head. Then I strode from the sleeping chambers.

~ Heather Heffner

War sounds romantic, heroic even, until everyone you know starts dying.

~ Amy A. Bartol

To a man, professional soldiers despised terrorists, and each would dream about getting them in an even-up-battle; the idea of the Field of Honor had never died for the real professionals. It was the place where the ultimate decision was made on the basis of courage and skill, on the basis of manhood itself, and it was this concept that marked the professional soldier as a romantic, a person who truly believed in the rules.

~ Tom Clancy

Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.

~ M.l. Stedman

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

~ Albert Einstein

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.

~ Rosamunde Pilcher

War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest, it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.The warlike nations do not inherit the earth, they represent the decaying human element....

~ Norman Angell

... it would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war.

~ Hermann Hesse

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

~ Norman Mailer

Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.

~ Vasily Grossman

Father never approved of my toysSaw them as child's playthingsI was a childThey were my worldI ruled thereAnd he stepped on themDestroying themAnd in turnDestroyed meI should have been left to playNow I must step on everything

~ T.p. Louise

He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe.

~ Anthony Marra

I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and Ilove thee more.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Politics is an endless, borderless war against individual liberty.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

~ Victor Hugo

Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

~ Victor Hugo

War isn't about making historywar is about breaking the present.

~ Christoforos Darbinian

There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.

~ Dalton Trumbo

There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.

~ Dalton Trumbo

The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government).

~ Stefan Molyneux

But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.

~ Aldous Huxley

What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he is talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?

~ Dalton Trumbo

A Quote from Monty's journal in God Must Be Weeping, I, too, wished to climb the ladder of life and reach the stars spangling by the gates of the Milky Way, where the wondrous mysteries of Heaven unfurled.

~ J.d. Winston

All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue.

~ Chris Hedges

Abdullah to Kim Burton: War is like disease. Until you've had it, you don't know it. But no. That's a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold that stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war - countries (America) like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. Tt's why you fight wars more than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.

~ Kamila Shamsie