Top 100 Great War Quotes
#1. There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.
Sam Peckinpah
#2. If truth is the first victim of war, then read on - I've got some great lies for you this month.
Alan Gorrie
#3. As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived.
Daniel Morgan
#4. The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#6. Unfortunately, we have warring in the world, so the youngest minds, the brilliant minds, are sent off to war. I think that, you know, you have brilliant people with great possibilities and that's why I really am not really for war. I really am not.
Stevie Wonder
#7. There were strange noises in the room, great bellowing sobs that did not sound like anything human. They bounced off the wals, echoing in her ears. Stop! she wanted to cry at the person who was making the noise. Then she realised that it was her.
Kate Williams
#8. The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.
Anne Sullivan
#9. The massive quantities of radiation that would be released in a war fought with nuclear weapons might, over time, cause such great changes in the human gene pool that following generations might not be recognizable as human beings.
Helen Caldicott
#10. 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
#11. Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small?
Langston Hughes
#12. My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.
Lisa Papademetriou
#13. I want to tell you that I think this war is a great mistake.
Pierre Laval
#14. Far be it from me to paint a rosy picture of the future ... But I should be failing in my duty if, on the other side, I were not to convey the true impression, that this great nation is getting into its war stride.
Winston Churchill
#15. In this war, which was total in every sense of the word, we have seen many great changes in military science. It seems to me that not the least of these was the development of psychological warfare as a specific and effective weapon.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#16. 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
#17. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.
Ernst Junger
#18. Wars about trifles are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?
Anthony Trollope
#19. God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.
Adolf Hitler
#20. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Kate Atkinson
#21. As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#22. To be a mother is a great treasure. Mothers, in their unconditional and sacrificial love for their children, are the antidote to individualism; they are the greatest enemies against war.
Pope Francis
#23. There are anthropogenic state risks at the existential level as well: the longer we live in an internationally anarchic system, the greater the cumulative chance of a thermonuclear Armageddon or of a great war fought with other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, laying waste to civilization.
Nick Bostrom
#24. A similar statement appears in the US Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (European War) (30 September 1945): The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring.
George C. Marshall
#25. Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North's successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms ... one man was the government of the United States ... Lincoln was a great dictator ... This great constitutional dictator was self appointed.
Clinton Rossiter
#26. I support this proposal and agree with this great and important initiative to abolish militarism and war. I will continue to speak out for an end to the institution of militarism and war and for institutions built on international law and human rights and nonviolent conflict resolution.
Mairead Corrigan
#27. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.
Chuck Palahniuk
#28. Peace will never be won if men reserve for war their greatest efforts, Peace, too, requires well-directed and sustained sacrificial endeavor. Given that, we can, I believe, achieve the great goal of our foreign policy, that of enabling our people to enjoy in peace the blessings of liberty.
John Foster Dulles
#29. World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
Jon Meacham
#30. There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again ... You can look him straight in the eye and say, Son your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son of a Goddamned Bitch named Georgie Patton.
George S. Patton Jr.
#31. I want to tell you though, I'm having the absolute best birthday ever. Last night
this was so sweet, it means a great deal
to me
the other cult members got together and they all took me out to see Star Wars.
David Letterman
#32. As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.
Alexander Haig
#33. If Lord Duryodhana was an evil man, why did great men like Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Karna, entire army of Krishna fight war on his side??
Anand Neelakantan
#34. World War II has always been of great interest to me. I've known for decades that it was just one more war the politicians suckered us into.
Harry Browne
#35. Great way to fight a war - be prepared to defend yourself for winning.
Chris Kyle
#36. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if it all depended on this particular up or down.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.
Julius Caesar
#38. Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday ... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side ... in the great ideological wars of our time.
Isaiah Berlin
#39. These descendants divined myths in what was really history, for true memories were forgotten in chaos as vast arrays of daivi astras used in the Great War ravaged the land. That war destroyed almost everything. It took centuries for India to regain its old cultural vigour and intellectual depth.
Amish Tripathi
#40. As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
Albert Einstein
#41. When I was in Pulp, I actively did more TV stuff because that was during the Great Britpop Wars, and it seemed important to prove that indie people could speak. That war doesn't exist anymore.
Jarvis Cocker
#42. The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.
Thomas Jefferson
#43. I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
Terry Teachout
#44. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will.
Robert Service
#45. We had not only lost our childhood in the war but our lives had been tainted by the same experiences that still caused us great pain and sadness.
Ishmael Beah
#46. Only if we manage to see the universe as a single entity, in which every part reflects the whole and whose great beauty lies precisely in its variety, will we be able to understand exactly who and where we are.
Letters agains the war: Letter from Orsigna, 2001.
Tiziano Terzani
#47. I wish we could take the hill. Could flood right on over it and end the war, wipe them all away in one great motion. But we can't. No matter how much I wish ... or trust in God ...
Michael Shaara
#48. No commander was ever privileged to lead a finer force; no commander ever derived greater inspiration from the performance of his troops.
John J. Pershing
#49. In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.
Victor Hugo
#50. Great results, can be achieved with small forces.
Sun Tzu
#51. There is no War on Terrorism; it is The Great Game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.
John Pilger
#52. The power of declaring war being with the Legislature, the Executive should do nothing necessarily committing them to decide for war in preference of non-intercourse, which will be preferred by a great many.
Thomas Jefferson
#53. The public is a great actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you.
Arnold Bennett
#54. To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.
John Garth
#55. So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)
Robert Walser
#56. Alexander III of Macedon is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time.
Will Cuppy
#57. My name is Hazel. I started out as an idea, but I ended up something more. Not much more, to be honest. It's not like I grow up to become some great war hero or any sort of all important savior... but thanks to these two, at least I get to grow old.
Not everybody does.
Brian K. Vaughan
#58. It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.
Antony Beevor
#59. The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column.
Andrew Sullivan
#60. Leadership is only courage and wisdom, and a great carefulness of self.
John Buchan
#61. [S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically.
Nel Noddings
#62. Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.
Vita Sackville-West
#63. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.
Frederick The Great
#64. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.
C.S. Lewis
#65. In school, it got so that Elijah learned to talk his way out of anything, gave great long speeches so that his words snaked themselves like vines around the nuns until they could no longer move, [ ... ].
Joseph Boyden
#66. We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.
Joshua Ferris
#67. The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I'm trying to undo the "Great Society." It was L.B.J.'s war on poverty that led to our present mess.
Ronald Reagan
#68. I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#69. George Bush didn't campaign on, 'If you elect me, I'm going to be a great president to confront terrorism and launch a war in the Middle East' because nobody was thinking about it in the year 2000. But it became the defining issue of his presidency.
Mike Huckabee
#70. (P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.
Ralph Raico
#71. Education is the great growth industry of the Third World. Since the Second World War, we have multiplied the number of children in school by four, with even larger multiples for secondary and university education.
Arthur Lewis
#72. Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.
Lester B. Pearson
#73. A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.
Albert Pike
#74. The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven.
Christopher Buehlman
#75. World will be so beautiful without war.
Every child will grow up without fear.
Mother will smile; child will play.
Friendship will prosper all the way.
Love harmony and peace everywhere.
It is our hope for our great future.
Debasish Mridha
#76. If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.
Theodore Roosevelt
#77. Germany has concluded a Non-Aggression Pact with Poland. We shall adhere to it unconditionally. We recognize Poland as the home of a great and nationally conscious people.
Adolf Hitler
#78. Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared.
Virginia Woolf
#79. We can't ignore the fact that ahead of us is a great war and this war is going to need significant preparation.
Ahad Ha'am
#80. So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war.
Nevil Shute
#81. In time of war, soldiers, however sensible, care a great deal more on some occasions about slaking their thirst than about the danger of enteric fever. Better known as typhoid, the disease is often spread by drinking contaminated water.
Winston Churchill
#82. I have never met a man [in the military], in or out of uniform, who ever said, "Let's use the missiles." They are even more terrified that the Bishops, because a great many of them don't expect to go to Heaven, which at least the Bishops do.
Clare Boothe Luce
#83. Put an end to so great an evil and arrive at a peace settlement whatever the outcome, and whatever the conditions.
William Of Tyre
#85. The Grand Illusion, one of the great war films of all time.
Studs Terkel
#86. If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#87. ..there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.
Masuji Ibuse
#88. 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
#89. More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.
Winston Churchill
#90. I'm for fighting a war on terrorism, not a war in Southwest Asia that Alexander the Great couldn't win, the British Empire couldn't win, the Soviet Union couldn't win. That's stupid. It's a waste of resources; a waste of America's best and brightest.
Kurt Schrader
#91. You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.
Junot Diaz
#92. This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.
Maxine Waters
#93. It's great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.
James Salter
#94. 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
#95. Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn't see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.
Kaimana Wolff
#96. I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about.
Scott Shane
#97. Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
Ben Shahn
#98. A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames.
Tim O'Brien
#99. The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#100. 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
