Top 100 Historical War Quotes
#1. Rebel Number Four" is waiting patiently by the door. I named him "Rebel Number Four," for he is the fourth of his kind I have given the name "Rebel." To many he may be just a hound dog, but to me he is a champion and a friend to the end.
Nancy B. Brewer
#2. It was easy to imagine the beginning of time here, but also, perhaps, its end.
Chris Womersley
#3. Today's breakfast consist of rice and a piece of bread fried in a bit of salt pork grease. At least I have my memories of grand banquets and fine foods, but this is all the children have ever known. I suppose it is best not to have anything to compare.
Nancy B. Brewer
#4. She did not realise that there could be a joy - a spiritual ecstasy- in the touch of a certain man, or that she would long for his touch with all her being
Anne Rouen
#5. Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.
Elizabeth Wein
#6. The Baptist Church rejects man with wooden leg: It appears the Baptist preacher refused to baptize a veteran of the late war in the holy water- saying they only baptize flesh and blood, not wood.
Nancy B. Brewer
#7. It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse
Nancy B. Brewer
#8. The doctrine of "exit strategy" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. for the knowledge of the end is not given to us at the beginning.
Leon Wieseltier
#9. War's all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.
Samuel Snoek-Brown
#10. When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.
Trevor Nunn
#11. When you want something, all the Universe conspires to helping you achieve it.
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Just ask..
Victoria Aldridge Washuk
#12. World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and 'Fury' occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.
Richard Corliss
#13. That's why so many people want to be victims today. So they don't have to accept the burden of being raised without historical calamity - without war or famine. They want an excuse for the fact they're still not happy.
Scott Turow
#14. The porcelain doll residing in her white-pillared dollhouse was a mirage.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#15. But we have a war of ideals and ideas, and that is to sell democracy ...
John McCain
#16. On this night of the Harvest Moon. They tossed bones into the "Bone Fire" and asked the yellow moon to shine its protection over them. (Today we call it a "Bonfire")
Nancy B. Brewer
#17. The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.
Antony Beevor
#19. These trials aren't about revenge. They're about justice. Don't you want justice, Rose Justice?
Elizabeth Wein
#20. Ruth wiped her eyes. Successful at a price? Forgiven but damaged? She wished so much more for her baby sister.
Sarah Sundin
#21. This is a story of Africa. A pioneer woman's journey north was merely the beginning.
Jeffrey Whittam
#22. Instead of giving it [war] a rest I continued pursuing more research, talking to more people on the subject as if I was to please this aftermath of the book by knowledge that was more historical and psychological than literary and aesthetical.
Sasa Stanisic
#23. All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.
Victor Cousin
#25. Like the magnolia tree,
She bends with the wind,
Trials and tribulation may weather her,
Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms,
See her standing there, like steel,
With her roots forever buried,
Deep in her Southern soil.
Nancy B. Brewer
#26. To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.
Ewa Kopacz
#27. Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.
Nancy B. Brewer
#28. Sonetimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself.
Sarah Sundin
#29. We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We'll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won't be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.
Tyler Cowen
#30. The assassination at Sarajevo was certainly the crucial precedent of the European war that its conspirators had sought, but was not the historical cause ... The assassination acted as a lever, prying the various powers into predictable paths.
J. Bowyer Bell
#31. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.
Chris Womersley
#34. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.
Jodi Picoult
#35. If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.
Jefferson Davis
#36. As their figures recede, it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight.
Nadifa Mohamed
#37. I am afraid, my dear niece, that a 'mere woman' is something you most certainly are not.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#38. Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#39. They would never forget the war. The world wouldn't let them, and neither would history.
Lee Strauss
#40. During World War I the Canadians were the shock troops. In many historical cases, Canadians have been very proficient at killing, and doing what we have to in order to survive. But no one wants to acknowledge that fact.
Joseph Boyden
#41. He was wearing a little bag of "Mojo" around his neck.
Nancy B. Brewer
#42. So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill?
Dominique Wilson
#43. I am German, yes, but I am not a Nazi. There is a difference, and one day I hope you understand that.
Caroline Leech
#44. So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war.
Steven Pinker
#45. She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.
Nancy B. Brewer
#46. I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.
Barack Obama
#47. The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.
Paul De Man
#48. I am a survivor. But I am not unique of the people that survived the great late war. We all have our stories to tell. But for most of us the hardened corners have soften with the passage of time.
Nancy B. Brewer
#49. Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.
Nadifa Mohamed
#50. Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
George Orwell
#51. In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.
Nadifa Mohamed
#52. Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering - our civil war, if you will - I have solicited your aid.
Leonard Leventon
#53. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.
Lloyd DeMause
#54. Post World War II America draws a great deal of interest, but the students also seem to know quite a bit about American exceptionalism and its historical roots.
Mohammad Marandi
#55. (The golden goose has died, my prince turned into a frog, the Kingdom is lost, everyone has turned into stone and I am locked in the tower)
Nancy B. Brewer
#56. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Fill'd with death, ya pens'll hang ya.
Ron A Swan
#57. He threw his burning cigarette onto our clean living room floor and ground it into the wood with his boot.
We were about to become cigarettes.
Ruta Sepetys
#58. Shakespeare set a lot of his dramas in a historical perspective or war perspective, or he would study what was going on at that time.
Marcia Gay Harden
#59. Everybody wants to talk about sectarian conflicts of the war in Iraq, but the fact of the matter is, Sunnis have lived with Shias in harmony more in the confines of Iraq, in that land, than they have been in conflict. That's an historical fact.
Jack Keane
#60. NATO needs to adapt its strategy to meet new challenges
Angela Merkel
#61. [The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#62. One's child is always one's child no matter what age they might be. You worry when your child makes a noise, when he doesn't. It's a terrible kind of love. Terrible.
Chris Womersley
#63. Tolerance over time breeds resentment. Only through understanding, that comes from the acceptance of one another's differences, shall we find true peace.
Erndell Scott
#64. Peggy is a sovereign nation. She governs herself and those around her by her own laws.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#66. She raised her head and saw a squadron of fighter planes. She stretched her hand high as if she could grab hold and climb away from what she had done, from who she was.
Sarah Sundin
#67. I was too far away to hear what was said but I saw in Val's eyes the same fear that I had once known and could well guess at Lucas' unthinking remark.
Julia Lee Dean
#68. No Big Power in all history ever thought of itself as an aggressor. That is still true today.
A.J. Muste
#69. The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.
Jefferson Davis
#70. Saladin had the same immediate successor as all the great Muslim leaders of his time: civil war. Barely had he died that his empire was dismembered.
Amine Maalouf
#71. If you can write, you can read. And if you can read, you can better understand the world and its different societies. Knowledge is the key to destroying prejudice and individual hate, which always culminates in violence against the innocent.
The Black Rose
#72. The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#73. Directly in front of me, crossing the street, I saw a woman laughing and walking arm in arm with two men. When she came to the curb, she lifted her skirt with both hands and vulgarly displayed a pair of indigo stockings.
Nancy B. Brewer
#74. Vietnam is a jungle. You had jungle warfare. Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, you have sand. [There is no need to worry about a protracted war because] from a historical basis, Middle East conflicts do not last a long time.
Dan Quayle
#75. The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women's Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.
Patrick Mendis
#76. It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.
Elizabeth Wein
#78. In time of war, it is not enough to say, 'I am a citizen and I have rights.' One must also say, 'I am a citizen and I have obligations.
Kermit Roosevelt III
#79. I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.
Jefferson Davis
#80. The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.
Herbert Butterfield
#81. What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed. Such
Leo Tolstoy
#82. Ain't nothing too serious. Even death is a joke on the old devil, if we are living for the Lord.
Nancy B. Brewer
#83. The United States media is advocating for the country to go to battle with Spain and take over Cuba and Puerto Rico to gain advantage over the Atlantic," said Manuel. "They have swayed public opinion. I would not be surprised that the countries go into war, and we are caught in the middle.
Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini
#84. Brick walls towered over her. Decrepit staircases crowded about her. Nothing had changed. The line there, the lessons there, the rape there. Shouldn't the place be crimson with blood and black with shame?
Sarah Sundin
#85. According to Robert, his friend Moses was a soldier in the first war, as he described it. He fought Indians and soldiers in red coats.
Nancy B. Brewer
#86. What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?
Douglas A. Blackmon
#87. In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor.
James Franck
#88. Amy wondered if Bonaparte could declare war on Miss Gwen alone without breaking his peace with England
Lauren Willig
#89. It's their failure, my little Anna, not yours. Men who try to understand the world without the help of children are like men who try to bake bread without the help of yeast.
Gavriel Savit
#90. It seemed ironic to her that women were considered far too meek for the morbidity of war, and yet a child could give their life in a battle they did not even understand.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#92. Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.
- Winston S. Churchill
Ellen Brazer
#93. Julia Woodhull was many things: a lady of secrets, a patriot's niece, and a dead man's daughter. But one thing Julia Woodhull was most certainly not was a fool.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#95. The historical record suggests that the transition to to a new hegemon has always been attended by what I have elsewhere called hegemonic war.
Robert Gilpin
#96. [ ... ] That is why we are here today, because we have had the strength within us to survive, a flame inside of us that have not gone out. We are still human, not dust, like millions of others, and we will continue to be, no matter what adversity we face.
Liv-Christine Hoem
#98. Long ago she'd clamped an iron shell around her heart and nothing and no one could pry it lose, but deep inside the tender flesh still beat.
Sarah Sundin
#99. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chamges was miracle enough.
Ransom Riggs
#100. The soft, fluttering cry of a barn owl rose over the churchyard. Silent men flowed out of the dark.
Parke Godwin
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