War Quotes

I absolutely hate the way the United States glorifies its military and its wars. Real heroes fight for peace.

~ Michelle Templet

In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor. James Franck, The Manhattan Project neatly summarize the atmic bomb.

~ James Franck

Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.

~ Jonathan Franzen

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Being a hero is the easiest way to meet a bullet with your name on it.

~ David Kendall

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy . . . who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.

~ Victor Hugo

The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they've forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven't asked for it. You probably fancy that there's no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that's dear to me and that I live by.

~ Boris Pasternak

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.

~ Greg Johnson

An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

~ Nicole Mones

With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in giving a hiding to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.

~ Leon Trotsky

For this last, Before and in Corioli, let me say, I cannot speak him home: he stopp'd the fliers; And by his rare example made the coward Turn terror into sport: as weeds before A vessel under sail, so men obey'd And fell below his stem: his sword, death's stamp, Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot He was a thing of blood, whose every motion Was timed with dying cries: alone he enter'd The mortal gate of the city, which he painted With shunless destiny; aidless came off, And with a sudden reinforcement struck Corioli like a planet: now all's his: When, by and by, the din of war gan pierce His ready sense; then straight his doubled spirit Re-quicken'd what in flesh was fatigate, And to the battle came he; where he did Run reeking o'er the lives of men, as if 'Twere a perpetual spoil: and till we call'd Both field and city ours, he never stood To ease his breast with panting.

~ William Shakespeare

When the clouds over the land rise like a mountain, a long with it's wishes, it can never cover the errors and mistakes made by Kings.

~ Auliq Ice

Protesting is never a disturbance of the peace. Corruption, injustice, war and intimidation are disturbances of the peace.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.

~ Alfred Nobel

Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.

~ Victor Davis Hanson

Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

~ David Mitchell

Rampaging horsemen can conquer, only the city can civilize.

~ James A. Michener

As long as greed is the root of all evil, there will not be peace.Get rid of selfishness and greed too will disappear.

~ Zarina Bibi

We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility.

~ Anaïs Nin

The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.

~ Karl Dönitz

At the fringe edge of advancement it's a war of anarchy and chaos.

~ Bryant Mcgill

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

~ Paullina Simons

Isn't it funny how true peace describes war and chaos?

~ Lionel Suggs

Why are our people going out there,” said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves’ Guild.Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and … additional wealth I na new land,” said Lord Vetinari.“What’s in it for the Klatchians?” said Lord Downey.“Oh, they’ve gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for northern,” said Lord Vetinari.“A mastery summation, if I may say so, my lord,” said Mr. Burleigh. The Patrician looked down again at his notes. “Oh, I do beg your pardon, I seem to have read those last to sentences in the wrong order…

~ Terry Pratchett

The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.

~ Thomas Szasz

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

~ Sydney J. Harris

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. ‘Automatic warfare’ cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance. (...)The advent of ‘automatic warfare’ should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations’ claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people’s fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant.

~ B.h. Liddell Hart

Can there be any question that the human is the least harmonious beast in the forest and the creature most toxic to the nest?

~ Randy Thornhorn

In ticking off the things that weren’t done, it was easy to forget the big thing that was done. Against overwhelming odds, with the most meager resources, and often at fearful self-sacrifice, a few determined men reversed the course of the war in the Pacific. Japan would never again take the offensive. Yet the margin was thin—so narrow that almost any man there could say with pride that he personally helped turn the tide at Midway. It was indeed, as General Marshall said in Washington, “the closest squeak and the greatest victory.

~ Walter Lord

What comes through war is given back through war. All spoils will be retaken, all plunder will be dispersed. All victors will be defeated and every city filled with prey will be sacked in its turn.

~ Joseph Joubertber

In war, the only true victory is peace.

~ Donald L. Hicks

In war, the key to victory is the ability to surprise one's opponent.

~ Paulo Coelho

But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere.'They?' Who are 'they?'I don't know. Just people.That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifies the means.' Is that what you believe?

~ John Connolly

Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.

~ Sun Tzu

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

~ Mark Lawrence

Today is yesterday's victory, yesterday is tomorrow's conquest, and tomorrow is today's war. Though I face death, I am not fearsome.

~ Nadège Richards

It might be added, too, that it takes something more than preponderance of numbers to win a battle....

~ Burton E. Stevenson

some smart alecs of those days after World War I used to say: The French fought for liberty, the British fought to control the seas, but the Americans fought for souvenirs.

~ Harry Truman

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

As the sun disappeared below the horizon and its glare no longer reflected off a glassy sea, I thought of how beautiful the sunsets always were in the Pacific. They were even more beautiful than over Mobile Bay. Suddenly a thought hit me like a thunderbolt. Would I live to see the sunset tomorrow?

~ Eugene B. Sledge