Top 91 I Went To War Quotes
#1. I went [to war] because I couldn't help it. I didn't want the glory or the pay; I wanted the right thing done.
Louisa May Alcott
#2. I went to war ... I survived, while other men around me died ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.
Gregory David Roberts
#3. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.
Otto Dix
#4. I'll tell you that for me, one when someone used to say something that was true, one way I knew it was true was that I immediately felt defensive. I blocked it off, and I went to war with them in my mind and suffered all that goes with it. And they were only saying what was true.
Byron Katie
#5. FDR, JFK, LBJ [all Democratic presidents ] we have a pretty long list of presidents who maybe were not entirely forthcoming with intelligence information before they went to war, so I'd be cautious against making legal cases against the administration.
Barack Obama
#6. When I first went into the active Army, you could tell someone to move a chair across the room. Now you have to tell them why.
Robert Lembke
#7. If Iran and North Korea, by some horrible, devilish, nightmarish scenario, got together and went to war at the same time, one against Saudi Arabia and one against South Korea, I don't know what we would do about that. I don't know that we could stop them short of using nuclear weapons.
Ben Stein
#8. The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
Tim O'Brien
#9. I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.
Radhanath Swami
#10. The life changing moment for me what the first time I went to a war zone and that was Sierra Leone. I took two weeks, eleven years ago and I went. I wasn't an Ambassador or anything I just asked to go and I was allowed to go. It was like someone smacked me in the face.
Angelina Jolie
#11. If it hadn't been for Bill Macdonald's book 'The True Intrepid,' I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.
Susanna Kearsley
#12. When I was a kid, my dad went to World War II. I didn't know him. I was born in '41.
Nick Nolte
#13. I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#14. By the time the United States went to war with Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, I had made three trips to the country. I covered the fall of the Taliban in Kandahar and have been returning routinely for the past 14 years.
Lynsey Addario
#15. Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.
Dan Savage
#16. I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.
Richard Engel
#17. In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn't much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn't want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it.
Richard Engel
#18. I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.
James Rosenquist
#19. My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.
Elie Wiesel
#20. When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.
Angelina Jolie
#21. And then I went to the University of New Hampshire for two years, and then the war came along.
Betty Hill
#22. One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think - even the activists - that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: 'Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn't stop the war so what's the use of doing it again?'
Noam Chomsky
#23. A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.
Jane Green
#24. I wouldn't choose conscientious objector and I wouldn't go to Canada. I did what Hap did and almost went to prison. I think the threw me a bone as the war was winding down, and I think they accepted my sincerity for being against that war.
Joe R. Lansdale
#25. After lunch we went into the garden for coffee and I turned on the Surgeon-General with his graphics, percentages etc. of sick and wounded to entertain the Premier.
Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig
#27. See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway. - Percy Jackson
Rick Riordan
#29. I grew up being told by my parents each time they went off to war that they may explode, so I needed to know how things like the gadgets in the kitchen worked.
Olivia Wilde
#30. More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.
Elizabeth Wein
#31. The 'defense' budget is three quarters of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year well over 25%. I guarantee you: when war becomes that profitable, we're going to see more of it.
Chalmers Johnson
#32. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all.
Kurt Vonnegut
#33. I like to make movies the way people made movies in the '70s, where they lived and died with these stories, and cared about them, and went to war for them, and they all said something they wanted to say.
Judd Apatow
#34. After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#35. The first time I went to Iraq was October 2002, when Saddam was still in power, and then, subsequently, in January of 2003, about three-and-a-half months before the U.S. invasion. So, I got to see the before and after of Iraq, basically, before and after the war.
Farnaz Fassihi
#36. I want to go to war," Eddie Dean said calmly.
"You don't know what you're talking about," Roland said, "but you're going to find out."
Eddie nodded. They went to their war.
Stephen King
#37. My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#38. Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.
Martin Parr
#39. I'm sure some of the things I went through pale in comparison to what some of the guys went through in World War II and other conflicts. On top of all the shit they went through in Vietnam, they had to come home to a country that spat on them.
Chris Kyle
#40. For the first time in a decade I felt a voice rising from deep inside my soul. It cried out 'what will you be today?' and I heard 'relentless' booming from the rafters inside an old gym as Sami and a group of young men chased dreams and trophies while their fathers went to war.
Tucker Elliot
#41. After the war, I went to the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, a suburb of Reading. It was a big aerial system to listen to radio programmes all over the world.
Michael Bond
#42. I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with.
Phil Klay
#43. My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went.
Ted Koppel
#44. I went home one night and told my dad that an older kid was picking on me. My Dad, a Korean War vet and a Chicago cop for 30 years, told me, 'You better pick up a brick and hit him in the head.' That's when I thought, 'Wow, I'm going to have to start dealing with things in a different way.'
Steve Wilkos
#45. In World War II, the government went to the private sector. The government asked the private sector for help in doing things that the government could not do. The private sector complied. That is what I am suggesting.
Carly Fiorina
#46. I got very spoiled. Everybody said you will never ever work on such a good movie, you know. I did, because I went on to work on Captain America, which also has a great director, which is Joe Johnston, one of my heroes who designed the old Star Wars movies.
Daniel Simon
#47. I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.
Joan Baez
#48. Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.
Michael Herr
#49. Well, I was a very strong opponent of the war, in fact, one of those who went door to door to my colleagues and thus achieved 60 percent of the Democrats voting no against this war.
Jan Schakowsky
#50. I went to work the next day out of curiosity, as people return to their villages after the war to see what is left.
Miranda July
#51. I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.
Neil Sheehan
#52. A hard core life I toast to ex flaw, therefore I live raw and went to war wit the law.
Big L
#53. Of course I would never compare myself to someone who actually went through a war, but I definitely matured shooting 'The Pacific.' I'm more calm and I have more patience.
Rami Malek
#54. I am not sure that you, the younger generations, will like to go to war that we went through. So, we learn as the mistakes are being committed.
Ibrahim Babangida
#55. I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
Steven Spielberg
#56. I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
P.D. James
#57. I'm not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.
Benjamin Spock
#58. My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.
Douglass North
#59. No, I went to the bar to ask for a mojito and that guy Johnny said he didn't make mojitos. Then he offered to make me a mint julep, in one of those silver cups and everything."
"Did you know say the true cause of the Civil War was some Northerner adding nutmeg to a mint julep?" Lucy asked.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#60. Two years later, I went to the University of Minnesota from which I was on leave for several years during the war as a member of Statistical Research Group at Columbia University.
George Stigler
#61. I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.
Madeleine Albright
#62. My father took me back home, back to Greenwich Village, and he thought by taking me out of the orphanage he'd be out of the World War too. But no way - they got him anyway. He went in the Navy and then I lived on the streets.
Gregory Corso
#63. I think the key that happened on 9/11 is we went from considering terrorist attacks as a law enforcement problem to considering terrorist attacks, especially on the scale we have on 9/11, as being an act of war.
Dick Cheney
#64. I am asked if I think the war was a just war ... how can I answer? I was a boy born and raised in beautiful Leningrad, a boy who loved his parents and went obediently to school. A boy who was yanked out of that life and dumped in a strange land where life followed different rules.
Vladislav Tamarov
#65. I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
Jerry Spinelli
#66. Go back," he said.
"Can't. Stand aside?"
"Can't."
"So it's like that?" I said.
Fix exhaled. Then he nodded. "Yeah."
And for the first time in a decade the Winter Knight and Summer Knight went to war.
Jim Butcher
#67. War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.
Sebastian Junger
#68. I didn't show up at the ceremony to collect any of my first three Oscars. Once I went fishing, another time there was a war on, and on another occasion, I remember, I was suddenly taken drunk.
John Ford
#69. As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.
Asne Seierstad
#70. It was very gray, very dreary. Everything was still rationed when I first saw the United States in 1951. I went over to visit my sister who was a war bride.
John Mahoney
#71. I would have married her before I went away to war too, just to make sure that someone else didn't.
V.T. Davy
#72. Want to play some Battleship?
I wasn't leaving him alone with that thing in there.
Chad armed himself with a notebook, and we went to war. Historically, war has often been used as a distraction for problems at home.
Patricia Briggs
#73. The President is no more than a well-meaning baboon. I went to the White House directly after tea, where I found "The Original Gorilla", about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now.
George B. McClellan
#74. I'm a child of the '60s, I came of age then. I went to a couple of demonstrations, and then in the late '60s when the Vietnam anti-war movement grew as the Vietnam War was heating up, I became very involved in that.
Simi Linton
#75. I was in charge of price controls in World War II and had a ceiling on overall prices. Everybody who was subject to general maximum price regulation wanted an exception and went to Congress to persuade a Congressman, or a group of people on the Hill, that I was being a menace to their industry.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#76. I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.
Gerald Scarfe
#77. I have always been absurdly, ridiculously tall. To give you an idea- when we went on school trips to Interesting and Improving Places, the form-master wouldn't say "Meet under the clock tower," or "Meet under the War Memorial," but "Meet under Adams.
Douglas Adams
#78. I watched the Star Wars trilogy with some good friends of mine for the first time in a few years, I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies-one of those first mashup books-and then I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with my family.
Ian Doescher
#79. John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.
Russell Banks
#80. When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.
Lukas Foss
#81. I went over to the Charlestown Navy Yard yesterday and saw some big men of war, one over 100 guns.
John D. Long
#82. The Iran-Iraq war began the same year that I went to primary school, at the age of six.
Hassan Blasim
#83. I lived on the top of one hill and the school was at the top of another hill. Nobody ever went to school by car - we didn't have any cars during the war. So that to and from school was itself a training.
Roger Bannister
#84. I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.
Jane Goodall
#85. I don't know about you, but where I went to school, Money Management 101 wasn't offered. Instead we learned about the War of 1812, which of course is something I use every single day.
T. Harv Eker
#86. Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he would have spent a lot of time without any female contact. He was part of the fellowship of men who went to war, and I think, really, that's what he's writing about.
Richard C. Armitage
#87. My father had been in the German Diplomatic Service, and although he had been in the United States since World War II and out of diplomacy, it was something that was very much talked about in the family. So when I went to college, it was always my intention to try to get into the Foreign Service.
Hermann Eilts
#88. Me and my father went through a war period where we wasn't talking. He wanted me to go to theology school - I didn't want to go. I wanted to do music. I told him I was a minister through music.
Wyclef Jean
#89. I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.
David Bowie
#90. When I was 6 my father went to fight in the war, so he was my big hero. I thought he was the greatest thing.
Michael Caine
#91. When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.
Nicolas Roeg
