Top 100 American War Quotes
#1. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
Noam Chomsky
#2. If you listen closely to the voices of our veterans, you understand that yes, they all returned from war changed, but what never changed is this: They never forgot your generosity. They never forgot the power of opportunity. They never forgot the American dream.
Michael Mullen
#3. They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.
Henry A. Kissinger
#4. I want to introduce my readers to people they may never have met, take them places they may never have visited, and present them with situations they may never have encountered.
J. Everett Prewitt
#5. If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
Noam Chomsky
#6. This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.
But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#7. I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.
Richard M. Nixon
#8. With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relative, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army ...
Robert E.Lee
#9. The entire American media apparatus bought into the drug war - which is an enormously damaging and costly undertaking for this country - and there wasn't enough critical reporting about it and that's why it's gotten out of hand.
David Talbot
#10. The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
Matt Gallagher
#11. The American way of war is to build an army, then another, then a third, while building fleets. If the war is still on at that point we smash.
Jerry Pournelle
#12. Everything on this earth right now is about labor and slavery. War is the only American export left that anyone wants to buy.
Roseanne Barr
#13. American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.
Camille Paglia
#14. It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail.
Jeannette Rankin
#15. The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war. He had neither a national army nor an organized church.
Charles Eastman
#16. The only people benefiting in Iraq war are George Bush's Jr. friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn't be happier.
Joseph Stiglitz
#17. Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.
Conrad Black
#18. We've always known that Democrats are anti-war, and we've always known that we can't really count on them when it comes to national defense. But we have finally seen with whom they will go to war: the American people who disagree with them.
Rush Limbaugh
#19. In the United States, after World War II, it took about two decades for the message to slowly seep in that inflation was going to be a permanent fact of the American way of life.
Murray Rothbard
#20. Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Jerry Saltz
#21. The War Powers Act requires presidents to seek the consent of the American people, through their representatives, before sending our troops into war. It is the responsibility of Congress to deliberate and consult with the executive branch before involving ourselves in a military conflict.
Charles B. Rangel
#22. During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam.
Gerald R. Ford
#24. In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#25. (I think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.) The
Noam Chomsky
#26. George W. Bush: a person who is the ultimate outcome of the American condition. Someone promoted above ability because of circumstance and organisation and empathy. You don't have to be intelligent. A moron in a hurry could know that you don't prevent war by having a war.
David Lange
#27. On the contrary, I tried on numerous occasions to convince the American president not to go to war. I did what was within my capabilities to avoid that happening.
Silvio Berlusconi
#28. Hate war, but love the American Warrior.
Hal Moore
#29. I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.
Tim O'Brien
#30. When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#31. Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima ... The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.
Harry S. Truman
#32. The concept of war crimes is an American invention.
George Wald
#33. You know, God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject.
Nancy Pelosi
#34. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt has been described as founder of the Bull Moose Party, the man who led his troops up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, a big game hunter, family man, civic servant and a host of other things.
Zig Ziglar
#35. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Dylan Moran
#36. Long before 9/11 and the war in Iraq, a lot of people hated the United States and the West. But what the Iraqi war seems to have done, at least in ... I mean, I'm just reporting what I see from the people on the ground, is that it has silenced many pro-American forces in the Muslim world.
Yaroslav Trofimov
#37. In any event, it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam.
Laurence Silberman
#38. In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.
Werner Heisenberg
#39. The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
H.L. Mencken
#40. If now we were livingin the Revolutionary War and George Washington he being arrested through Britain. For sure he, they would consider him enemy combatant. But American, they consider him as hero.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
#41. The American republics have no standing armies to intimidate a discontented minority; but as no minority has as yet been reduced to declare open war, the necessity of an army has not been felt.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#42. Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.
Victor Davis Hanson
#43. After the Cold War, to rally the American people to understand that we had to be a part of solutions. It's one thing to say that we have to run everything, it's another to say we don't want anything to do with it.
Madeleine Albright
#44. I return with feelings of misgiving from my third war-I was the first American commander to put his signature to a paper ending a war when we did not win it.
Bill Vaughan
#45. The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.
Benjamin Rush
#46. It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.
Tiffany Madison
#47. The war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits.
Abraham Lincoln
#48. As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.
Maggie Stiefvater
#49. Although most Americans believed in Manifest Destiny, few could agree on exactly which lands the United States was supposed to govern.
Charles W. Carey Jr.
#50. It would be contrary to the spirit of the American Government to use force to subjugate the South.
William H. Seward
#51. I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.
Gary Paulsen
#52. I did not want 'Battleship' to be perceived as an American war film. I wanted to do everything I could to make the film accessible to a global audience. It felt like bringing an alien component to the film would help take the American jingoism out of it.
Peter Berg
#53. Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties, and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terror.
George Pataki
#54. REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian.
Ambrose Bierce
#55. The NSA was actually concerned back in the time of the crypto-wars with improving American security. Nowadays, we see that their priority is weakening our security, just so they have a better chance of keeping an eye on us.
Edward Snowden
#56. I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.
Dave Barry
#57. The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin
about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;
Andrei Cherny
#58. 1 month ago the American people stopped to remember the third anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war. We thought first and foremost of the selflessness, patriotism and heroism by our troops, our National Guard and Reserves.
Rosa DeLauro
#59. You have a responsibility to confront the war games - the American killing machine.
Philip Berrigan
#60. Our relationship with the United States is not reduced to questions of fighting terrorism and the Iraq war. German-American relations were so good for so many years because they extended deeply into the normal lives of people.
Angela Merkel
#61. In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war.
Barack Obama
#62. There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War.
Gertrude Stein
#63. You have opened a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people ... I am confident that this beginning of our friendship will certainly meet with majority support of our two peoples.
Zhou Enlai
#64. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
Karl Marlantes
#65. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.
John Parker
#66. There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.
Michelle Alexander
#67. The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn't win by thinking inside the box and following someone else's rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you.
Brad Thor
#68. Why should you ask blood be spilled for a cause that is not in the interest of the American people?
Wally Herger
#69. If we stick together as an American people we can bring down the war criminals that are running our country right now.
Cindy Sheehan
#70. It is a kind of ego booster, the way Egypt's winning the 1973 war, in the first stages, was an uplift. But I did not find when I spoke to people that the war in Iraq was seen as the major issue in American-Arab relations.
Walter Russell Mead
#71. With no notice to the American people ... this country entered the war ... Stranger than the fact was the passive acceptance of it.
Garet Garrett
#72. My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War.
Joel Kinnaman
#73. I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.
Jonathan Haidt
#74. Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the victim should laugh.
Kurt Vonnegut
#75. The great American game should be an unrelenting war of nerves.
Ty Cobb
#76. The period that I would anoint as the golden era in American journalism was from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. It had three separate major strands: the Civil Rights struggle over integration of schools and public facilities in the South; the Vietnam War; and Watergate.
Anonymous
#77. I don't think that the administration is being particularly honest with the American people about what this is going to cost in life and in dollars, what the dangers are, retaliatory strikes, once it happens. This is not a war that needs to happen immediately, if ever.
Janeane Garofalo
#78. [David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.
David Halberstam
#79. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?
Thomas Pynchon
#80. Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.
Philip Caputo
#81. A secret history of the US Government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a safe haven in the US for Nazis and their collaborators after WW2 and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
James Morcan
#82. Once brave politicians and others explain the war on drugs' true cost, the American people will scream for a cease-fire. Bring the troops home, people will urge. Treat drugs as a health problem, not as a matter for the criminal justice system.
Larry Elder
#83. President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either.
David Letterman
#84. Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.
Ron Paul
#85. The Quiet American is anti the people who took them into the Vietnam War.
Michael Caine
#86. I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.
Nigel Hamilton
#87. Before we put an American in harm's way, tell us why. No one wants to see the region descend into further chaos. There's a lot of concern about getting embroiled in another Vietnam and ... about sending American troops once again to fight someone else's war.
Xavier Becerra
#88. And there were no signs whatever of the disagreements among capitalists - or of the Anglo-American war - that Stalin's ideological illusions had led him to expect.
John Lewis Gaddis
#89. Astonishingly, American taxpayers now will be forced to finance a multi-billion dollar jobs program in Iraq. Suddenly the war is about jobs. We export our manufacturing jobs to Asia, and now we plan to export our welfare jobs to Iraq, all at the expense of the poor and the middle class here at home.
Ron Paul
#90. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
Nigel Hamilton
#91. When fraternities are not allowed, Communism flourishes. Young men who are inexperienced but have faith are more useful than older, experienced men without faith. The fraternity system is a bastion of American strength.
Barry Goldwater
#92. Like any other people, like fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in every land, when the issue of peace or war has been put squarely to the American people, they have registered for peace.
Paul Robeson
#93. I think it's inconsistent to tell the American people that you oppose the war and, yet, you continue to vote to fund the war. Because every time you vote to fund the war, you're reauthorizing the war all over again.
Dennis Kucinich
#94. The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.
Gail Collins
#95. There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
Theodore White
#96. American people are a little tired of anybody saying, let's get back in war. Why don't we go back (inaudible).
Juan Williams
#97. We believe US threats of an approaching World War III and their use of Iran's nuclear issue as an excuse is another form of American insanity.
Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah
#98. We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor
Benjamin Netanyahu
#99. Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.
Frederick Douglass
#100. Our cause in the war on terror isn't helped when we have army officers like Lieutenant General William Boykin speaking in evangelical churches and claiming this as some sort of battle for the Christian religion. That's wrong. That's un-American.
John F. Kerry
