Top 100 About War Quotes
#1. If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.
George R R Martin
#2. How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?
Isabel Allende
#3. The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard; and he that is glowing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.
Samuel Johnson
#4. To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.
Janine Di Giovanni
#5. My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.
Kevin Powers
#6. The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.
Ellen Glasgow
#7. Those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.
Walter Cronkite
#8. I don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.
Avril Lavigne
#9. What's so civil about war anyway?
Axl Rose
#10. Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.
Nick Turse
#11. A lot of movies that come from Israel are about war, but there is such good, funny, rounded writing that comes from the country that I wish more people would discover.
Odeya Rush
#12. There's so much more to tell about Africa than the usual stories about war, famine and disease.
Komla Dumor
#13. It doesn't matter who started it or what it's really about ... war usually ends up sucking most for women. Even when we're not fighting the battles ourselves, we somehow always end up with the lion's share of the suffering.
Brian K. Vaughan
#14. I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war.
Tim O'Brien
#15. The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.
Tim Hetherington
#16. I personally feel like, if you're watching a film about war, you should get a sense of what it's really like.
Angelina Jolie
#17. How do I feel about war? Well anybody I guess, I hope, I don't like it.
Gerald Scarfe
#18. It is not that you know nothing about war, young man ... It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.
Richard Flanagan
#19. The roughest thing was learning the realities of the world at such a young age. I was 10 or 11, going to church, hearing the adults standing on the podium talking about world affairs, about history, about war, and how America was founded.
Michelle Rodriguez
#20. If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war.
Suzanne Collins
#21. Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.
Lawrence Block
#22. I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.
Paddy Chayefsky
#23. I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.
Suzanne Collins
#24. If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
Virginia Woolf
#25. There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.
Jon Krakauer
#26. That's the attractive thing about war," said Rosewater. "Absolutely everybody gets a little something.
Kurt Vonnegut
#27. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Omar Nelson Bradley
#28. Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.
John McCain
#29. When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.
Ben Shahn
#30. I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
Sebastian Junger
#31. The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its influence on the qualities of American life. Civic duty requires more.
David K. Shipler
#32. The odd thing about war, it shows who you are, not who you think you are ... most likely, you won't like the truth.
Joe Matlock
#33. With a strong sense of the imminence of death, you will feel the need to engage in spiritual practice, improving your mind and not wasting your time on various distractions ranging from eating and drinking to endless talk about war, romance, and gossip.
Dalai Lama XIV
#34. You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.
Phil Klay
#35. The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.
Georg Brandes
#36. Many people think making a film about history ... about war ... about the Holocaust, it might be heavy, dramatic and traumatic. I don't see things like that ... you can find irony everywhere. It's how I look at life.
Arnon Goldfinger
#37. Drons change the way politicians think about war. You already have society's barriers against war dropping, and now you have a technology that takes the barriers to the ground. We can carry it out without having to deal with some of the consequences of sending our sons and daughters into harm's way.
P. W. Singer
#38. Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.
Jayne Anne Phillips
#39. Lara Jones never fails to tell me that my reading about war makes me weird, but I can't get her fascination with reading abour fairies and wizards, so I guess that makes us even.
A.S. King
#40. I wanted to write a song about war and that classic 'We want you' recruitment style from the point of view of the recruiter.
Troye Sivan
#41. With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
Mira Nair
#42. There are four things you need to know about war. One, every action requires careful tactics. Two, never lose hope and fight only for what is right. Three, be brave but you don't have to be fearless. And four, be willing to sacrifice.
Courtney Allison Moulton
#43. The media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.
Bruce Jackson
#44. It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.
Margaret Stohl
#45. APPENDIX SOME WORDS ABOUT WAR AND PEACE (Published in Russian Archive, 1868)
Leo Tolstoy
#46. War pictures are always fascinating for people; they were for me growing up, even though I'm not nuts about war."
"War is the ultimate conflict, and conflict is the basis of drama to begin with.
Clint Eastwood
#47. You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!
William Tecumseh Sherman
#48. I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war.
Phil Klay
#49. I find it hard myself to feel justified to sing in a very politically direct way about war or social conditions because I feel so ignorant of a lot of it.
PJ Harvey
#50. There aren't a lot of guys like me left. But I'm a war horse. I've been through it all. And you know something about war horses? Through the sleet, through the snow, they just keep going.
Joel Silver
#51. I have a theory about war mages," I said. "The more powerful they are, the worse the hair.
Karen Chance
#52. If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.
Phil Klay
#54. It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.
Phil Klay
#55. If ordinary people really knew that consciousness and not matter is the link that connects us with each other and the world, then their views about war and peace, environmental pollution, social justice, religous values, and all other human endeavors would change radically.
Amit Goswami
#56. There ain't nothin' you can say about war that ain't personal. It's all personal.
Dan Groat
#57. It seemed to me to be entirely un-kosher, if that's a word, to try to put a debate about war right in front of the midterm to try to affect the midterm outcomes.
Tim Kaine
#59. When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.
Abigail Disney
#60. I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#61. What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.
David Gascoyne
#62. I'm generally not a fan of didactic art because it papers over many of the hard experiences about war or anything else in life. I wanted to explore various aspects of the experience without an eye towards delivering any particular message.
Phil Klay
#63. What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Aldous Huxley
#64. You don't learn about war by sitting in libraries. Though if people spent more time in libraries, maybe there would be fewer wars.
Joanne Hall
#66. Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That's the whole point about war!
Margaret Atwood
#67. It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.
Chang-rae Lee
#68. Many of the best films made about war have come out after the wars have ended. People need a period of time to reflect on them.
Irwin Winkler
#70. The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.
Paul Fussell
#71. The game of chess. Supposedly men made it up, and it's about war and men and the ravages and the bravery and the genius of commanding and moving pieces and ... No. It's marriage. The Queen moves anywhere she wants.
Bill Cosby
#72. There's nothing I don't know about war. The stench of it. But I say that without any pride. War is a terrible thing. My hope is that you'll get that through looking at one of my pictures.
Don McCullin
#73. Your moral education's over." Jean stared up into the sky as the dockside receded and Bug took them out into the canal's heart. "Now you're going to learn a thing or two about war.
Scott Lynch
#74. I love Apocalypse Now because it's a war movie, but yet it's not really a movie about war.
Vincent Paronnaud
#75. Mr. Norrell did not know a great deal about war, but he suspected that soldiers are not generally your great respecters of books. They might put their dirty fingers on them. They might tear them! They might- horror of horrors!- read them and try the spells!
Susanna Clarke
#76. The evolution of the brain is directly proportionate to the evolution of humanity. Only when the brain has collected enough data about war, will it move on to collate information about love.
Craig Stone
#77. There's a big thing in Canada that parents need to talk to their children about drugs and sex. I don't think talking to your kids about war is any less important than that.
Deborah Ellis
#78. There is a feminist proverb I learned from my mother: The personal is political. There's a powerful literary stereotype that men write about war and politics and public life, while women confine themselves to family and food and personal life.
Annia Ciezadlo
#79. If war occurs, that positive adult contact in every shape is needed more than ever. It will be a matter of emotional life and death. There's not a handy one-minute way of talking to your kid about war.
Richard Louv
#80. For me, 'Come and See' is, by a million miles, the best film about war that has ever been made. I would highly recommend, encourage and enforce anyone to watch it.
Rhys Ifans
#81. Nothing gets us down more than watching violence on television or reading about war and brutality in the newspaper. The truth is, there's a massive reduction in the amount of violence around the world.
Peter Diamandis
#82. There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.
Marcus Luttrell
#83. I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.
George W. Bush
#84. I have watched a lot of films... about war... but still I can't understand what's the purpose of war???
Killing inocent people??
About religion... so my god says that killing other people isn't acceptable... but your is acceptable???
WTF
Deyth Banger
#85. He goes on and on about war like it is something beautiful and noble, which only means he's never seen it himself. War is hideous and it leaves you covered in shit. I cannot kill anyone else. I will not.
Anita Diamant
#86. If you talk about genres - I don't care if you're talking about war, Westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy, humor, romance - anything you can find, strolling the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I can bring you many comic books representing each genre.
Michael Uslan
#87. The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
Billy Collins
#88. A nice thing about war-not that anything about war is nice, I guess-is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is - and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.
Jon Stewart
#90. The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley
#91. There is no such thing as a "war hero", because there is nothing about war that is heroic.
Michel Templet
#92. I think it's very uncomfortable for people to talk to children about war, and so they don't because it's easier not to. But then you have young people at eighteen who are enlisting in the army, and they really don't have the slightest idea what they're getting into.
Suzanne Collins
#93. I wonder what I can do about war. Is it the destiny of human kind to eventually wipe ourselves out with these weapons of mass destruction? Are we stupid to think that we can control them?
Malachy McCourt
#94. When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.
Tim O'Brien
#95. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
Omar Nelson Bradley
#96. If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
Eric Schmidt
#97. In the half-reclined bed, Yaz slept, mouth open, snoring - probably doped. Mike turned on the TV. For twenty minutes, he watched retired generals on CNN discussing Afghanistan and troop surges as though they knew what the hell war was all about.
Pete Barber
#98. What is not conservative about saying, 'Don't go to war unless we go to war properly with a full declaration of war and no other way?'
Ron Paul
#99. Ran "Inchon" - it is a brutal but gripping picture about the Korean War and for once we're the good guys & the Communists are the villains. The producer was Japanese or Korean which probably explains the preceding sentence.
Ronald Reagan
#100. Sometimes the women much resent the men who call for war and have been known to rush upon them and beat them severely about the head and shoulders.
Peter Matthiessen
