Top 100 Business War Quotes
#1. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts.
George S. Patton
#2. The biggest threats to human survival today are not wars or conflict, it is modern business.
Steven Magee
#3. Danger has a bracing effect.
Sun Tzu
#4. Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
Sun Tzu
#5. The war against working people should be understood to be a real war ... . Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class ... . And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don't want anybody else to know about it.
Noam Chomsky
#6. That's your business, isn't it, cousin? To make nothing your business. Even your own sons going to war. How I pleaded with you. But you buried your nose in those cursed books and let our sons go like they were a pair of haramis.
Khaled Hosseini
#7. I would prefer a sword to fight duel, but a pen to plan a war.
Robert Thier
#8. Really, Mr. Lincoln, I have had enough of this show business.
Ulysses S. Grant
#9. I full well realize that politics is a rough and tumble business, but politics should not be reduced to lobbing partisan hand grenades. Politics is not war. Terrorism is.
Pat Roberts
#10. War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist.
M.F.K. Fisher
#11. There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.
Sun Tzu
#13. Business is warfare; don't get into it if you are afraid to draw blood.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#14. Fear will keep you alive in a war. Fear will keep you alive in business. There's nothing wrong with fear.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#15. In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.
Paul Graham
#16. Conceal your dispositions, and your condition will remain secret, which leads to victory; show your dispositions, and your condition will become patent, which leads to defeat.
Sun Tzu
#17. When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.
Maya Lin
#18. If you fight with all your might, there is a chance of life; where as death is certain if you cling to your corner
Sun Tzu
#19. When the common soldiers are too strong and their officers too weak, the result is INSUBORDINATION.
Sun Tzu
#20. It's not only the myths surrounding chess. Chess itself is a myth, you know? A game of hierarchy, of war. It's a story that people have been using to explain complex concepts for eons. Mathematics, yes. Geometry. Business. Philosophy. Even love.
Skye Warren
#21. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.
Sun Tzu
#22. World War III would become a great possibility, but such a scenario is quite possible under any new US administration ... To answer your question: business as usual.
Andre Vltchek
#23. who wishes to fight must first count the cost
Sun Tzu
#24. Being in this business for as long as I've been in it, it's sort of like living in a town or a city before the war and then after the war and then during the reconstruction and then during the time that it sprawls out to the malls.
Carly Simon
#25. Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.
Edward St. Aubyn
#26. At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you.
Sun Tzu
#28. Organized force alone enables the quiet and the weak to go about their business and to sleep securely in their beds, safe from the violent without or within.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
#29. In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.
Lynn Nottage
#30. Hengall the Warrior hated war. The business of life, he liked to say, is to plant grain, not blades.
Bernard Cornwell
#31. I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is, but it does not admit of holidays.
Abraham Lincoln
#32. Life is getting better, but that won't stop a war if politicians and business people decide it's to their advantage to have one.
Octavia Butler
#33. The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits - ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit.
Smedley Butler
#34. If you want your fridge-freezer and your car and a nice house and asphalt on the roads and a health service, then thank the weapons business. Thank the war economy that drives us to this.
Jasper Fforde
#35. If those who are sent to draw water begin by drinking themselves, the army is suffering from thirst. [One may know the condition of a whole army from the behavior of a single man.]
Sun Tzu
#36. The time has come when we must proceed with the business of carrying the war to the enemy, not permitting the greater portion of our armed forces and our valuable material to be immobilized within the continental United States.
George C. Marshall
#37. There is something about human nature that just doesn't want to face the reality that we live in two worlds. We live in the physical, material world where we have jobs, read books, and go about our business. And we live in a spiritual world - and that is a world at war.
John Eldredge
#38. If you do not take opportunity to advance and reward the deserving, your subordinates will not carry out your commands, and disaster will ensue.
Sun Tzu
#39. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked.
Sun Tzu
#40. All suffering is caused by one belief....the belief in separation
Vivian Amis
#41. Courage is the counterpoint of fear. Courage appears when in war or business, one is indeed scared.
G.R. Gopinath
#42. As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan.
Chelsea Manning
#43. Always remember: Business is War.
At the end of the day, the one with access to the best intel wins. This
applies as much to business and politics as it does to the military. Ask
every single billionaire and military or political strategist out there.
They will all confirm that as fact.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#44. When an invading force crosses a river in its onward march, do not advance to meet it in mid-stream. It will be best to let half the army get across, and then deliver your attack.
Sun Tzu
#45. The greatest change in corporate culture - and the way business is being conducted - may be the accelerated growth of relationships based ... on partnership.
Peter Drucker
#46. Bravery without forethought, causes a man to fight blindly and desperately like a mad bull. Such an opponent, must not be encountered with brute force, but may be lured into an ambush and slain.
Sun Tzu
#47. The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
D.H. Lawrence
#48. Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is desperate ground.
Sun Tzu
#49. As for the imperialist countries, we should unite with their peoples and strive to coexist peacefully with those countries, do business with them and prevent any possible war, but under no circumstances should we harbour any unrealistic notions about them.
Mao Zedong
#50. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.
Sun Tzu
#51. In cooking - as in business and war - hope for the best but plan for the worst.
Timothy Ferriss
#52. The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.
Sun Tzu
#53. When deliberating, think in campaigns and not battles; in wars and not
campaigns; in ultimate conquest and not wars.
Steven Pressfield
#54. The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.
George Will
#55. War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.
Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet
#56. Anyone who has been in business can tell war stories about the bumps in the road. But if they've outlasted the competition, ask for their stories about survival. They've figured out how to turn disappointments into opportunities.
Harvey MacKay
#57. Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!
Christian Nestell Bovee
#58. War is the most profitable business on earth
Kenneth Eade
#59. If his forces are united, separate them.
Sun Tzu
#60. [2015] it's a time that there's a clash of ideologies, similar to the Cold War. I think that a story like this has been waiting to be told, and I think it's a fresh look at the whole earth-shattering business of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Steven Knight
#61. We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
Karl Barth
#62. So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.
Havelock Ellis
#63. When the outlook is bright, bring it before their eyes; but tell them nothing when the situation is gloomy.
Sun Tzu
#64. The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points;
Sun Tzu
#65. Do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat
Sun Tzu
#66. I want to start my own airplane business. I'm going to buy two Dakotas, paint them up in war colours and do, er, nostalgia trips to Arnhem - you know, where the old paratroopers used to go - and charge them about 20 quid a time.
Gary Numan
#67. It's because fear sells. It's because war is sport. And it's also very good business.
Hugh Howey
#68. Detainee policy in this war is hard, it's complicated, but we must get it right. We would be better off as a nation if we could close Gitmo safely and start a new prison that he could use that the world would see as a better way to doing business.
Lindsey Graham
#69. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.
Giannina Braschi
#70. War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#71. When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.
Sun Tzu
#72. Great results, can be achieved with small forces.
Sun Tzu
#73. Carrie lay on the bed and gazed at the ceiling. She was back in business. It was a day to remember. December 7, the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The next day America declared war on Japan.
America declared war. And she was a whore again.
Jackie Collins
#74. War is only a passing phase in business life ... If you want my opinion there's nothing like a spot of patriotism for blinding people to reality.
J.G. Farrell
#75. If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.
Henry L. Stimson
#76. To begin by bluster, but afterwards to take fright at the enemy's numbers, shows a supreme lack of intelligence.
Sun Tzu
#78. Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.
Robertson Davies
#79. The battle of the North Atlantic is a grim business, and it isn't going to be won by charm and personality.
Edmund H. North
#80. Whether in an advantageous position or a disadvantageous one, the opposite state should be always present to your mind.
Sun Tzu
#81. All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.
Duke Of Wellington
#82. Never venture, never win!
Sun Tzu
#83. The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against 'the rich' and big business, they don't care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up end up unemployed.
Thomas Sowell
#84. Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.
Sun Tzu
#85. The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo - but they faded away. It wasn't that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.
Pete Hamill
#86. We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.
Sun Tzu
#87. Be stern in the council-chamber, [Show no weakness, and insist on your plans being ratified by the sovereign.] so that you may control the situation.
Sun Tzu
#89. There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.
Sun Tzu
#90. You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended.
Sun Tzu
#91. War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.
David Douglas Duncan
#93. Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.
Sun Tzu
#94. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called 'religion,' and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor.
Robert Sheckley
#95. I love 'The War Of The Roses,' especially as my husband is in it! I've often said to him it would be great to remake that with me and him in it, because then we could really get down to some serious business.
Catherine Zeta-Jones
#96. Rouse him, and learn the principle of his activity or inactivity. Force him to reveal himself, so as to find out his vulnerable spots.
Sun Tzu
#97. There are two kinds of warriors:
those on the battlefield,
and those in the boardroom;
both are out to win.
But the age of King Alexander has gone,
and the age of Bill Gates has come.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#98. The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich.
Michael Moore
#99. It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly, by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self-expression, and little more.
Kurt Vonnegut
#100. War what is it good for? It's good for business.
Billy Bragg
