History War Quotes

#1. In the whole course of history, war had always fallen on the shoulders of the young.

Alexandra Bracken

#2. This is the true lesson of our history: war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served for the most part not to protect us, as we are constantly told, but rather to sap our economic vitality and undermine our civil and economic liberties.

Robert Higgs

#3. The cold war was the longest war in United States history. Because of the nuclear capabilities of our enemy it was the most dangerous conflict our country ever faced. Those that won this war did so in obscurity. Those that gave their lives in the cold war have never been properly honored.

Harry Reid

#4. War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can't be bettered learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget.

Robert Graff

#5. Churchill's 2,054 page book "Second World War" makes no mention of genocide or the murder of Jews. Coincidentally, Churchill was a strong proponent of eugenic legislation prior to the outbreak of WWII.

A.E. Samaan

#6. Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee

#7. Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.

Vidkun Quisling

#8. When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.

Dick Pirozzolo

#9. Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.

Lebbeus Woods

#10. To die,
so young to die.
No, no, not I,
I love the warm sunny skies,
light, song, shining eyes,
I want no war, no battle cry,
No, no, not I.

Hannah Senesh

#11. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.

Leela Corman

#12. The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.

Bruce Catton

#13. There's never been a war in the history of the world that wasn't started by the wealthy for the wealthy

Deborah Smith

#14. The only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitors that the danger of war arises.

Richard M. Nixon

#15. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

Gordon Brown

#16. After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.

Bob Woodward

#17. France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war

Charles De Gaulle

#18. War does one good - it teaches people geography.

Will Durant

#19. We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.

Waylon Jennings

#20. Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

Stephen Ambrose

#21. How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson

Aberjhani

#22. While the framers of the United States Constitution were ashamed of slavery and used euphemisms in place of the term "slave", the authors of the Confederate Constitution proudly used the term no less than ten times.

C.L. Gammon

#23. The Annual Register for 1763 tabulated the casualty list for British sailors in the Seven Years' War with France. Out of 184,899 men raised or rounded up for the war, 133, 708 died from disease, primarily scurvy, while only 1,512 were killed in action.

Stephen R. Brown

#24. 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

#25. But Clara's father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#26. The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration.

Thomas Harding

#27. War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

Will Durant

#28. He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying,

Richard Flanagan

#29. I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

Abba Eban

#30. We didn't have an indigenous Taliban before 2008. We didn't have a war in Swat before 2008, we didn't have a war in Waziristan. We never, in our 63-year history, we have never allowed unmanned Predator drones from ANY country to fly over our skies and kill our citizens.

Fatima Bhutto

#31. Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Sarah Vowell

#32. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.

Ray Bradbury

#33. On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step

Nadeem Aslam

#34. But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.

James Lee Burke

#35. In 1946 there was no money in art, no dealer galleries, no craft shops. After the war we started to teach art in every school for the first time. Our generation played a crucial role. We were the stepping stones towards today's galleries.

Theresa Sjoquist

#36. You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.

Richard Eberhart

#37. Like a child in new boots leaping from puddle to puddle, this view sees history as leapfrogging from one bloodbath to the next, from World War One to World War Two to the Cold War, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide, from Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler.

Yuval Noah Harari

#38. Old, is it?" the man asks.
"Yes, very."
"Pre-war, is it?"
"Yes," I say. "If by war you mean the Norman invasion.

Garrett Carr

#39. Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.

David Letterman

#40. I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

Lisel Mueller

#41. Many people think making a film about history ... about war ... about the Holocaust, it might be heavy, dramatic and traumatic. I don't see things like that ... you can find irony everywhere. It's how I look at life.

Arnon Goldfinger

#42. Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.

Thomas Carlyle

#43. I was always a friend of southern rights, but an enemy of southern wrongs.

Benjamin Butler

#44. The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.

John Ruskin

#45. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.

Douglas MacArthur

#46. * Pindar, a Thebian Greek wrote (circa 350 B.C.E.) War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.

Pindar

#47. President Reagan fueled the spirit of America. His smile, his optimism, his total belief in the ultimate triumph of democracy and freedom, and his willingness to act on that belief, helped end the Cold War and usher in a new and brighter phase of history.

Colin Powell

#48. There's nothing anyone can do except change the subject.

Philibert Orry

#49. I was reminded of our history lessons, in which we learned about the loot or bounty an army enjoys when a battle is won. I began to see the awards and recognition just like that. They were little jewels without much meaning. I needed to concentrate on winning the war.

Malala Yousafzai

#50. The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.

Michael Scheuer

#51. I would sum up the German character best by saying that they are the best of losers and the worst of winners.

Edmund Ironside

#52. In the history of battles and wars, the massacres of civilians were the main reason of revolutions success.

M.F. Moonzajer

#53. The fact is that America has been at her most prosperous when government and the private sector have been not at war, but in a wary, if often underplayed, alliance. History is unmistakable on this point.

Jon Meacham

#54. I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

Stanley Hauerwas

#55. I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride - humility in the weight of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this home of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised.

Douglas MacArthur

#56. In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form of deception resembling lunacy.

Laurence Lafore

#57. The authors of all our misfortune.

Jefferson Davis

#58. The scale and grandeur of the Russian effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.

Douglas MacArthur

#59. I do not suppose that at any moment of history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.

Winston S. Churchill

#60. Despite what everyone thinks, hatred is what makes the world goes round not love. Just look at Hitler, he changed the world with his hatred so did Abraham Lincoln. He didn't free the slaves out of love, he simply hated the Confederates so he did something to piss them off and win the war.

Hermione Daguin

#61. The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.

C. Vann Woodward

#62. Perhaps when the next Great War comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

George Orwell

#63. A personal story of the horrors that Poles lived through during World War II. When God Looked the Other Way, above all else, explains why there is still a Poland ... One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face.

Arnold Beichman

#64. The biggest farce of man's history has been the argument that wars are fought to save civilization.

Charles E. McKenzie

#65. ...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.

David Willis McCullough

#66. The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is a matter of perspective: it all depends on the observer and the verdict of history.

Pentti Linkola

#67. Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.

Vera Brittain

#68. Gentlemen, you are about to witness the most famous victory in history.

Adolf Hitler

#69. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

C.S. Lewis

#70. It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.

John Bartholomew Gough

#71. I know that I'm already in the history books and that people are going to remember me as the prisoner of war and the fabricated stories, but you know, to me I was just another soldier over there doing my job.

Jessica Lynch

#72. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.

Nigel Hamilton

#73. I wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would've experienced it in a different light because I don't think he understood the nature of war.

Oliver Stone

#74. History doesn't mean dates and wars and textbooks to me; it means the unconquerable pioneer spirit of man.

Henry Ford

#75. Thanks to history books, I have realised that people over the years have been dying of war, and that enabled me to realise that there is nothing stupid like war.

Kamal Haasan

#76. History will never change because of politics or conquests or theories or wars; that's mere repitition, it's been going on since the beginning of time. History will only change when we are able to use the energy of love, just as we use energy of the wind, the seas, the atom.

Paulo Coelho

#77. No Big Power in all history ever thought of itself as an aggressor. That is still true today.

A.J. Muste

#78. I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.

Jeremy Corbyn

#79. I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.

David Benioff

#80. Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.

Samuel E. Morison

#81. In the twenty-five years that have passed since the ending of the World War when the people of this country emerged from generations of humiliation under foreign occupation, we have accomplished much to our credit, overcome many difficulties and changed the course of our history.

Tunku Abdul Rahman

#82. There is no such thing as a "peacekeeping mission" in the Middle East. Period. The Middle East has been at war, literally, since the dawn of history. The

Larry Correia

#83. Racial hatred in America still exists but never was it anything like the time immediately after the Civil War. The western history of our nation would not be complete without the story of former slaves that helped develop the unique character of the West.

William Silverman

#84. One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.

Henry Adams

#85. The Establishment center ... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

George McGovern

#86. The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.

Chris Hedges

#87. Christopher Lynch has made the best and the first careful translation of Machiavelli's Art of War. With useful notes, an excellent introduction, an interpretive essay, glossary, and index, it is a treasure for readers of military history and Renaissance thought as well as for lovers of Machiavelli.

Harvey Mansfield

#88. But whom could I resent?...the wheel of history turned by those war- and peacemakers whom I did not know?

Uyen Nicole Duong

#89. I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.

Terence Winter

#90. Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. ... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.

Oliver Stone

#91. Godless, 'we had no war.'
Until God set us to fight each other, for the rest of human history.

Chuck Palahniuk

#92. The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.

Jill Lepore

#93. Iraq began destroying those missiles they don't have over the weekend. See, President Bush may be the smartest military president in history. First, he gets Iraq to destroy all of their own weapons. Then he declares war.

Jay Leno

#94. SO YOU ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO REJECT MY DIVINITY! - Caligula, 37 CE.

Joseph Shellim

#95. Throughout the history of humanity, only one refuge kept books safe from war and conflagration: the walking library, an idea that occurred to the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, at the end of the tenth century. This

Eduardo Galeano

#96. Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

Noam Chomsky

#97. She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.

Stuart Jaffe

#98. History is a symptom of our disease

Mao Zedong

#99. The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

Susan Jacoby

#100. The fact is that the New Deal did not work. It prolonged what might have been a troubling two-year downturn into a horrifying blow to world prosperity that ended up in a war that killed countless millions. It was one of the greatest acts of wreckage in world history.

Llewellyn Rockwell