Top 100 Its War Quotes
#1. The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the 'battlefield' is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited 'battlefield.'
Glenn Greenwald
#2. 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
#3. Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too?
Robert Fisk
#4. Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely.
Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
#5. If Midnight's Children is India's One Hundred Years of Solitude, then A Suitable Boy must be its War and Peace.
Whitaker
#6. The United States is using its war on drugs as an excuse to expand its control over Latin America.
Evo Morales
#7. I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war ... suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.
Philip Caputo
#8. Imagine if the United States, in its war against Hitler, had said to Stalin: we don't want your support until you make your country democratic.
Natan Sharansky
#9. The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.
Barbara Tuchman
#10. The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation.
Clara Zetkin
#11. Bush spoke of another principle, that a just war must "support a just cause." In the Persian Gulf, he said, "our cause could not be more noble." What nation has ever said its war was not noble?
Colman McCarthy
#12. Every nation has its war party ... It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition.
Robert M. La Follette
#13. Legitimate steps of self-defence which Israel takes in its war against Palestinian terror - actions which any sovereign state is obligated to undertake to ensure the security of its citizens - are presented by those who hate Israel as aggressive, Nazi-like steps.
Ariel Sharon
#14. Science has rolled its war wagons over the crushed myths of so many religious beliefs. It has marshaled its mechanics to explain the motions of the sun, moon, and stars. It has mapped the heavens, leaving no place for gods to live.
Walker Evans
#16. Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.
Kenneth Rexroth
#17. If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within five years men would be having abortions!
Harry Browne
#18. Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Robert Graves
#19. This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry ... I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America ... Everything else is swept away.
Winston Churchill
#20. War must be made as intense and awful as possible in order to make it short, and thus to diminish its horrors.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#21. There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.
Susan Griffin
#22. When one person can initiate war, by its definition, a republic no longer exists.
Ron Paul
#23. People like to come up to me and tell me that I've got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren't just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system.
CM Punk
#24. In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.
Murray N. Rothbard
#25. What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
Jonathan Sacks
#26. War, like politics, was men's work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women's loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself,
Karen Abbott
#27. The author of the Mahabharata has not established the necessity of physical warfare; on the contrary he has proved its futility.
Mahatma Gandhi
#28. The visual impact of a United States battleship springs from its ability to put Soviet ships on the bottom of the sea and to put devastating firepower ashore - nothing else.
John Lehman
#29. In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.
Anthony Zinni
#30. The cost of war is like an immeasurable tremor that knows no borders, its shockwaves reverberating across the world resulting in universal suffering.
Aysha Taryam
#31. I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption.
Mahatma Gandhi
#32. As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president goes to Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms of course.
Andrew Greeley
#33. If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.
Edouard Daladier
#34. I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
Mark Twain
#35. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
John Hersey
#36. The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.
Ludwig Von Mises
#37. There is no glory in war, yet from the blackness of its history, there emerge vivid colours of human character and courage. Those who risked their lives to help their friends.
Silvia Cartwright
#38. There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years ... We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.
Paul Wolfowitz
#39. Israel is in the midst of a difficult military and diplomatic campaign against terrorists. An organisation that works to prove allegations that Israel is committing war crimes should be so good as to do so with its own resources and not with civilian national service volunteers and state funds.
Uri Orbach
#40. We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.
George W. Bush
#41. It must now atone in blood for its complicity in wickedness.
Abraham Lincoln
#42. Winners never talk about glorious victories. Thats because they're the ones who see what the battle field looks like afterwards. Its only the losers who have glorious victories.
Terry Pratchett
#43. Men, you are in a battle. You are in a war. The stakes of this war and its casualties are higher than a checkmark in the win or loss column. Lives will be lost. Eternities will be shaped. Destinies will either be discovered or dismissed. Dreams will be attained or relinquished.
Tony Evans
#45. Terry Farish seems to breathe the reader into the emotional spaces of war, exile, and refugee life. The Good Braider is a delicate stunning exploration of its young protagonist's life and heart.
Uma Krishnaswami
#46. Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.
Jim Webb
#47. A government which should have no other means of exacting obedience than open war must be very near its ruin, for one of two alternatives would then probably occur:
Alexis De Tocqueville
#48. While there are many causes for which a state goes to war, its fundamental object can be epitomized as that of ensuring the continuance of its policy - in face of the determination of the opposing state to pursue a contrary policy. In the human will lies the source and mainspring of conflict.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#49. Avoid the wrath of the war outside the heart! It keeps raging on.
Hold on to its lullaby, even when the beats are gone.
The same things that both haunt and heal,
are the reason of bliss and the tears,
that you can only feel.
Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
#50. 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
#51. Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.
Meir Kahane
#52. Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.
Philip Zaleski
#53. One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit -- now struggling to quit its material tenement -- flit when at length released?
Charlotte Bronte
#54. Khaldoun believed that the great curse of civilization is not war or famine but humidity: "When the moisture, with its evil vapors ascends to the brain, the mind and body and the ability to think are dulled. The result is stupidity, carelessness and a general intemperance.
Eric Weiner
#55. The Marine Corps has to ask itself, 'What does our nation need from its premier crisis response force?' We are America's shock troops in war and peace. I know it sounds corny, but it's not.
James F. Amos
#56. A nation's strength is found not in the number of its laws but in the character of its people.
James Montgomery Boice
#57. A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.
Michael Parenti
#58. [The Soviets] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth; they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Ronald Reagan
#59. There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Daniel Berrigan
#60. I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.
Adam Michnik
#61. This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this.
Mary Heaton Vorse
#62. There's a kind of permission for war which can be given only by the world's mood and atmosphere, the feel of its pulse. It would be madness to undertake a war without that permission.
Jean Giraudoux
#63. A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose.
Romain Rolland
#64. What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
Ambrose Bierce
#65. Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease.
Menander
#66. Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
Bob Dylan
#67. Left with nothing but my own bloody fingertips, I let out a war cry of my own, raked my nails over its face, and fought like a girl.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#68. No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.
Guy Sajer
#69. War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.
Elie Ducommun
#70. Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense
what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.
Dag Hammarskjold
#71. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
George Orwell
#72. I was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929, eleven years after the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart following its defeat in World War I.
Eric Kandel
#73. Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.
Daniel Berrigan
#74. On the McLaughlin Report, August 26, 1990: 'There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the middle East, the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.
Pat Buchanan
#75. Inspire the Vocal Brass, Inspire;
The World is past its Infant Age:
Arms and Honour,
Arms and Honour,
Set the Martial Mind on Fire,
And kindle Manly Rage.
John Dryden
#76. [The South] is ****ed for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.
Richard M. Weaver
#78. I refuse to be silent any longer. I refuse to be party to an illegal and immoral war against people who did nothing to deserve our aggression. My oath of office is to protect and defend America's laws and its people. By refusing unlawful orders for an illegal war, I fulfill that oath today.
Ehren Watada
#79. Every age has its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions and its own peculiar preconceptions.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#80. Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
#81. When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first ... Of course, to observe is not its real duty, we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed ... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious.
Alan Turing
#82. During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.
Erik Larson
#83. In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#84. The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans.
Hermann Hesse
#85. Standing navies, as well as standing armies, serve to keep alive the spirit of war even in the meek heart of peace. In its very embers and smoulderings, they nourish that fatal fire, and half-pay officers, as the priests of Mars, yet guard the temple, though no god be there.
Herman Melville
#86. America and its allies are engaged in a war against a terrorist movement that spans all corners of the globe. It is sparked by radical ideologues that breed hatred, oppression, and violence against all of their declared enemies.
Kenny Marchant
#87. The post-Cold War order in Europe is finished, with Vladimir Putin its executioner. Russia's invasion of Georgia only marked its passing. Russia has emerged as a born-again 19th-century power determined to challenge the intellectual, moral and institutional foundations of the order.
Ivan Krastev
#88. 'The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.'
Floyd Skloot
#89. I have so many books on my shelves that I can now start a war with some country and have supplies for years to come throwing books at its citizens!
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#90. As the world stood on the brink of war in August 1914, the local paper of a small town in the west of Ireland took a stand: 'We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you.
Robert Hutton
#91. War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.
Andre Malraux
#92. For all its ubiquity and its universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary - the escape from the gray everyday, from the humdrum into higher things.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#93. The existence and increase of our race and nation, the sustenance of its children and the purity of its blood, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland, and the nation's ability to fulfill the mission appointed to it by the Creator of the universe.
Adolf Hitler
#94. Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?
Gloria E. Anzaldua
#95. Since the enactment of the War Powers Act in 1973, which I supported then and support now, Congress has been reluctant to assert its authority when presidents decide to send American soldiers into harm's way.
Charles B. Rangel
#96. The moral equation strongly tells everyone who understands freedom, who understands morality, that Israel is engaging in a just war in defense of its people and its freedom.
George Pataki
#97. A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.
Linda Colley
#98. At the end of the war American and Soviet troops massed throughout most of the European peninsula, with Americans also in Britain and the British in Europe. The peninsula was occupied, shattered and exhausted, no longer the arbiter of its own fate.
George Friedman
#99. During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
#100. Laying aside also all considerations of works and engines of war, the invention of which has long since reached its limit, and for the improvement of which I see no further hope in the applied arts, I shall recognize the following types of stratagems connected with siege operations ...
Frontinus
