Top 100 Before The War Quotes
#1. We need to get insurance out of the way and let the consumer interact with their doctor the way they did basically before World War II,
Rand Paul
#2. Since the outbreak of war, there has been in our country a steady increase in the consumption of spirits, wine and beer. It is estimated that in dollar volume, the annual outlay is now practically double what it was before the war.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
#3. Rachel kneeled beside Jacob. She took the child's hand and pressed it to the dirt. Her father had told Rachel that Harmons had been on this land since before the Revolutionary War.
"Don't ever forget what it feels like, Jacob," she whispered, and let her hand touch the ground as well.
Ron Rash
#4. One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.
Kenneth Clark
#5. With regard to ground of this nature, be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots, and carefully guard your line of supplies. Then you will be able to fight with advantage.
Sun Tzu
#6. Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Robert Graves
#7. The Balance, my boy, is the war that has been waged since before time was time, the battle within ourselves to do what is good and reject what is bad. It is a delicate line we all walk, a constant struggle of push and pull.
Nikolas Lee
#8. They have destroyed your weapons," he had told the generals, in effect. "But these weapons would in any case have become obsolete before the next war. That war will be fought with brand-new ones, and the army which is least hampered with obsolete material will have a great advantage.
Winston S. Churchill
#9. Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)
Lois McMaster Bujold
#10. People take sides on political things, such as the Vietnam War. War is immoral and war is wrong, but I don't think the clergy ought to bring it before the Church.
Warren Giles
#11. that's why I want you to continue toward your goal. If you have to wait until the war is over, then wait. But if you have to go before then, go on in pursuit of your dream.
Paulo Coelho
#12. When the higher officers are angry and insubordinate, and on meeting the enemy give battle on their own account from a feeling of resentment, before the commander-in-chief can tell whether or not he is in a position to fight, the result is ruin.
Sun Tzu
#13. Before you start a war, you better know what you're fighting for.
The Cab
#14. Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?
Paul Craig Roberts
#15. 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
#16. The United States came within a whisker of invading Utah in 1858 and starting a civil war three years before the Civil War. Because the conflict ended up fizzling out, it's not the most dramatic story about the West.
David Roberts
#17. I answered the call to heal before I answered the call of duty to my country. My job is to help and heal, not to destroy.
Jesseca Wheaton
#18. A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered. It doesn't help if you're a soldier. The effect is the same.
Paula McLain
#19. Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world. - EKYANNUS VIII, 111 APHORISMS Spring,
R. Scott Bakker
#20. 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
#21. But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair.
Rory Bremner
#22. Most of the victims of Nazi aggression were before the war less well off than Germany. They should not be expected by Germany to bear, unaided, the major costs of Nazi aggression.
James F. Byrnes
#23. Circumstances cause us to act the way we do. We should always bear this in mind before judging the actions of others. I realized this from the start during World War II.
Thor Heyerdahl
#24. When two sides who consider each other enemies converge in armed struggle, for the moment they are no longer enemies. They are fellow human beings who face the same two choices that their ancestors did for centuries before them: to destroy each other or to prosper together.
Thomas Huynh
#25. Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.
Jurgen Habermas
#26. President Bush was widely ridiculed for consulting the Reverend Billy Graham before the Gulf war.
William Bennett
#27. Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.
Thomas Sowell
#28. Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
David Halberstam
#29. So do your duty, boys, and join with prideServe your country in her suicideFind the flags so you can wave goodbyeBut just before the end even treason might be worth a tryThis country is too young to dieI declare the war is overIt's over, it's over.
Phil Ochs
#30. General, if you put every Union soldier now on the other side of the Potomac on that field to approach me over the same line, I will kill them all before they reach my line.
James Longstreet
#31. Going to war is a serious matter. And it should be done very carefully and deliberately with clear national interests at stake before the United States or our Commander-in-Chief acts.
Joe Pitts
#32. In the beginning, science is a thing imagined; in the beginning, war is a thing imagined; in the beginning, love is a thing imagined; in the beginning, even God is a thing imagined. There is nothing that has not first been imagined. Even before there are words, there is imagination.
Bakhtiyar Ali
#33. The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.
Guy Sajer
#34. I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War.
Robyn Davidson
#35. Back when the country was strong, back before Elvis and before the Vietnam war came along.
Merle Haggard
#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. With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.
David McCullough
#38. In the end, they pardoned me and packed me off to a home for the shell-shocked. Shortly before the end of the war, I was discharged a second time, once again with the observation that I was subject to recall at any time.
George Grosz
#39. Would that we could choose the last image we see before death closes our eyes forever to this world.
Nick Hirst
#40. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#41. Kruger paused. He glared at the crowd massed before him, he squared his shoulders and, shaking his dusty fist towards them, he growled, "This time, when I say war, it will be war to the bitter end.
Martin Marais
#42. The freedom to express yourself without fear - that perhaps is something we in the U.S. take for granted. It's almost inconceivable to think we would be afraid to express our opinions or thoughts, but that's not true for all parts of the world now, and certainly not before World War II.
Friedrich St. Florian
#43. Love and war, it seemed, worked by the same rules. One had to hurry, before the fires flared out.
Robin Oliveira
#44. I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I've done it before. It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them.
Sam Shepard
#45. When he came he first covered me with his revolver', Christine write in her official report, but it was not long before Waem put the gun down on the table between them.
Clare Mulley
#46. One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve.
Kathleen Troia McFarland
#48. People should go about their daily lives, to work, to live, to travel, to shop, to do the things people did in the same way as they did them before 11 September.
Tony Blair
#49. Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
#50. We want to get the hell over there. The quicker we clean up this Goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the Goddamned Marines get all of the credit.
George S. Patton
#51. War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.
Paul Di Filippo
#52. Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war
Otto Von Bismarck
#53. The Japanese had a very strong belief in Bushido, death before dishonour. They were fighting for their country; they were the aggressors in World War II.
Steven Spielberg
#54. He smells safe, too, like sunlit walks in the orchard and silent breakfasts
in the dining hall. And in the moments before I drift off to sleep, I almost forget about our war-torn city and all the conflict that will
come to find us soon, if we don't find it first.
Veronica Roth
#55. That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.
Shimon Peres
#56. America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.
Marco Rubio
#57. We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheated, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armor, we would all weep.
Steven Erikson
#58. To say yes to your dreams means the internal and external war, battle, confrontation and warfare. But it doesn't mean you should give up on your dreams because you were already given the capacity and ability to overcome the adversary, before the foundations of the earth.
Euginia Herlihy
#59. Path To War was the last thing that John Frankenheimer directed, I think, before he died. I'm a huge U.S. history buff, and I studied the Vietnam era in college, so when I read the script, I was, like, "I really want to be in this thing so badly ... "
Peter Jacobson
#60. The way history is currently taught in schools, jumping from Hitler to the Henrys, is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars, where you have episode four before you have episode one. The sense of going on a journey of chronology and continuity, is incredibly important to the imagination.
Simon Schama
#61. I have adhered to my rule of never criticising any measure of war or policy after the event unless I had before expressed publicly or formally my opinion or warning about it.
Winston S. Churchill
#62. As a Korean War Veteran, I know too well the troubling nature of war. This is why I will always support a diplomatic answer before military intervention.
Charles B. Rangel
#63. The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
E.B. White
#64. Before it began to open new wounds, the war healed quite a few old ones: it shook us out of our lethargy, our life took on new meaning, we no longer lived without a purpose, eating and sleeping and excreting like animals.
Costas Taktsis
#65. You've said before, Ms. Nicolson, that your mother was a strong woman. She lived through the war,
Kate Morton
#66. On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth
Anthony Doerr
#67. I'd done the method bit before from, like, age 15 to 19. I was a Civil War re-enactor.
Cary Fukunaga
#68. Further, more African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision - either in prison, on parole or probation - than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War (Alexander 2012
Merrill Singer
#69. All the aftermath that so frequently follows in the wake of war still confront the nation, and we now, as ever before, must hold fast to the ancient landmarks and see to it that all of these plagues that threaten so mightily shall be rendered harmless.
Alexander Henry
#70. The next morning, the earth was strewn with debris from the windstorm the night before. An audience of trees looked down on severed limbs cast about the ground, their hunched and beaten postures reminding me of a congregation of amputees gathered in the wake of a war.
John Burley
#71. Before the war it had seemed incredible that such terrors and slaughters, even if they began, could last more than a few months. After the first two years it was difficult to believe that they would ever end.
Winston Churchill
#72. In Oxford before the war, I had, with this interest in mind, written a short textbook entitled, An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now my intention to rewrite this work.
James Meade
#73. Before the Civil War, the Southern states were selling a lot of cotton to England and didn't seem to mind British occupation. By and large, the Revolutionary War wasn't at all great for business.
Henry Rollins
#74. I don't like to be disturbed at home; I tell the cable office not to call me before 6:30 AM, unless there's a war.
U Thant
#75. Growing up in the 80's, I think a lot of us saw things that were "new," an experience we don't get too much of these days. We saw things that were never done before. When Star Wars first came out, no movie before that had ever looked that way.
Gabriel Campisi
#76. 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
#77. It is clear before God and man that the entire war on HIV and AIDS has not been waged with any degree of piety, responsibility and care.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi
#78. Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat.
Ron Paul
#79. We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.
George Wald
#80. Think of the condition of Europe for twenty years before, where people were fighting, not by thousands, but by millions; each one of whom as he struck his enemy wounded horribly some other innocent heart far away.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#81. And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.
E.L. Doctorow
#82. When has there ever been a government in German history that came to the people and revealed its detailed plans for the coming years? That could not happen before, since German governments planned war and conquest.
Walter Ulbricht
#83. He estimates that perhaps 250,000 slaves were imported illegally before the Civil War.
Howard Zinn
#84. Before we find world peace, we gotta find peace in the war on the streets.
Tupac Shakur
#85. Not slaves," said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. "Citizens, employed by government. They have same rights as other citizens - free speech, freedom of worship, the right to vote. Before the war, they worked in the Ilium Works, controlling machines, but now machines control themselves much better.
Anonymous
#86. The vast army of McClellan spread out before me. The marching columns extended back as far as eye could see in the distance. It was a grand and glorious spectacle, and it was impossible to look at it without admiration.
Daniel Harvey Hill
#87. 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
#88. Before the war an apple tree had stood behind the church. It was an apple tree that ate its own apples.
Herta Muller
#89. the taste for Victorian-era sci-fi futures is more than anything else a nostalgia for the last moment, before the carnage of World War I, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible.
David Graeber
#90. I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people ... twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#91. A battle that you win cancels any other bad action of yours. In the same way, by losing one, all the good things worked by you before become vain.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#92. If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.
Joseph Grew
#93. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.
Abraham Lincoln
#94. Recall the cold
Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn,
Wakefield, Tewkesbury : fastidious trumpets
Shrilling into the ruck ; some trampled
Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,
Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind's
Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.
Geoffrey Hill
#95. This [a surprise attack] is an operation by no means to be despised in war, although it is rare, and less brilliant than a great strategic combination which renders victory certain even before the battle is fought.
Antoine-Henri Jomini
#96. I'm a lad of the '60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.
Richard Branson
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Before the war there were many who were more or less ignorant of the international labor movement but who nevertheless turned to it for salvation when the threat of war arose. They hoped that the workers would never permit a war.
Hjalmar Branting
#100. Most people do not realize that there was a paid chaplain in Congress even before the Revolutionary War ended.
Francis Schaeffer
