Men And War Quotes

#1. You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.

Kurt Vonnegut

#2. I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and public, of peace and war.

John Milton

#3. War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.

Rex Stout

#4. We know the story of the Deluge from the Holy Scripture. Why did the first race of men come to such a tragic end? Because they had abandoned God and must die, guilty and innocent alike. They had only themselves to blame for their punishment. And it is the same today.

Wilm Hosenfeld

#5. That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.

K.W. Jeter

#6. There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.

Elizabeth Berg

#7. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.

Tyrtaeus

#8. Heavens no, Mrs. Miller. It's war, and I have managed to send men into battle. But I'm a merciful commander - I wouldn't dream of sending them in after you." "Then I'm staying." "Maybe not. I didn't say that I wouldn't come in after you myself.

Heather Graham

#9. A monarchy is like a man-of-war
bad shots between wind and water hurt it exceedingly; there is danger of capsizing. But democracy is a raft. You cannot easily overturn it. It is a wet place, but it is a pretty safe one.

Joseph Cook

#10. It's always fallen to women to forge the peace between all these hot-blooded men, always ready to go to war at the slightest provocation....Why do men behave the way they do, warring?"
"What do you think?" he asked.
"Maybe because they've got no sense of grief?

Nuruddin Farah

#11. Men should stop fighting among themselves and start fighting insects.

Luther Burbank

#12. Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

Gabriel Chevallier

#13. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

Dylan Moran

#14. His men had begun gathering the wounded or stunned into a small group some distance back up the slope. Here and there an animal or human stirred, but not many. There were few cries of pain or fear now. Mostly, it was eerily quiet. Even the insects had ceased their music.

Derek Donais

#15. 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

#16. So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.

Herman Melville

#17. War doesn't have heroes, it only has the men who lost so many things in their life that they just keep going and do the most unthinkable things, just because they don't care anymore.

Wouter Van Gastel

#18. The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

John Foster Dulles

#19. What sticks with me now is not so much the pain and terror and sorrow of the war, though I remember that well enough. What really sticks with me is the honor I had of defending my country, and of serving in the company of these men.

R.V. Burgin

#20. There is not a man who does not get senile by the time he reaches sixty. And when one thinks that he will not be senile, he is already so.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo

#21. Poverty and Discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich) and dwell upon every Tongue." He spoke of a few men, fed by "Lust of Power, Lust of Fame, Lust of Money," who got rich during the war.

Howard Zinn

#22. Would a CONSCIOUS human being destroy himself through war, and crime, and quarrels? No, a man simply knows not what he does to himself.

G.I. Gurdjieff

#23. To every man of us, Tobruk was a symbol of British resistance and we were now going to finish with it for good.

Erwin Rommel

#24. Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?

David Kenyon Webster

#25. War makes animals of men, and we can't let that happen to us. If we do, we won't have any chance of survival.

Shannon A. Thompson

#26. There are at present many Coloured men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and labourers, but real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets.

Frederick Douglass

#27. 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

#28. War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

Charles Caleb Colton

#29. From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.

Margot Asquith

#30. No one ever mentioned it, but thousands of men welcomed World War II as a way to escape their humdrum lives rather than a chance to fight for God and country.

Art Buchwald

#31. War is when young men dream of being grandfathers.

Erri De Luca

#32. No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.

Ambrose Bierce

#33. There was no honor in war, less in killing, and none in dying. But there was true dignity in how men comported themselves in battle. And there was always honor to be found in standing for a just cause and defending the defenseless.

Michael Scott

#34. When [men] go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace.

Saint Augustine

#35. How could you believe or disbelieve anything anymore? Four maybe five million men killed and none of them wanting to die while hundreds maybe thousands were left crazy or blind or crippled and couldn't die no matter how hard they tried.

Dalton Trumbo

#36. Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable. Disposable in war; disposable in work. We need warriors and volunteer firefighters, so we label these men heroes.

Warren Farrell

#37. The heavy round face was looking at him, the hard look of a man who had also understood, who had seen all the stupidity, who knew, after all, that the gold stars were often mindless decoration, that the army was led not by symbols, but by the fallible egos and blind fantasies of men.

Jeff Shaara

#38. Grace under pressure isn't just about bullfighters and men at war. It's about getting up every day to face a job or a white boss you don't like but have to face to feed your children so they'll grow up to be a better generation.

Ernest Gaines

#39. Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that - romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.

Kurt Vonnegut

#40. A South Carolina native, Miles was a lawyer, a mayor of Charleston, and a congressman. He was one of his state's "fire-eaters," a term applied to men who openly advocated secession rather than finding accomodation with the Union in the summer and fall of 1860.

Clint Johnson

#41. What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.

Wally Lamb

#42. Blood thirsty has nothing to do with guns and swords, it has all to do with vindictive inclinations

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#43. And I would like current or future politicians to make sure every avenue of diplomacy, and what you have, are exhausted before sending young men and women off to death and serious injury.

Tomas Young

#44. Approaching us through a haze of dust that overhung the road was a long column of men - a slovenly column that marched irregularly and out of step, so that it had the look of a gigantic centipede whose feet hurt.

Kenneth Roberts

#45. You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God - ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.

Kurt Vonnegut

#46. Let no man surrender so long as he is unwounded and can fight.

Bernard Law Montgomery

#47. [S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power
to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.

Ayn Rand

#48. The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.

Charles Hamilton Houston

#49. Following the war in Europe a large increase of European immigration to the United States is to be expected, of which the largest part is and always has been made up of men skilled in farming.

Arthur Capper

#50. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.

Leo Tolstoy

#51. George W. Bush presided over an international network of torture chambers and, with the help of a compliant Congress and press, launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.

Jodie Evans

#52. In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.

George Clooney

#53. It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.

Allan Gurganus

#54. I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damn scoundrel, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it ...

Nathan Bedford Forrest

#55. 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

#56. The lady is almost the only picturesque survival in a social order which tends less and less to tolerate the exceptional ... In the age-long war between men and women, she is a hostage in the enemy's camp. Her fortunes do not rise and fall with those of women but with those of men.

Emily James Smith Putnam

#57. War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.

C.E.M. Joad

#58. Thomas looked around and tried not to let his duty turn him bitter. These were good men, and he would not leave them behind. He had chosen this, an unselfish life.

Jessica Fortunato

#59. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

Kristin Hannah

#60. And we screamed. We screamed our war cry, our shout of slaughter, our joy of being men in battle who are driven by terror.

Bernard Cornwell

#61. When I get home and people ask me,'Hey, Hoot, why do you do it, man? What are you? Some kind of war junkie? I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the men next to you. And that's it. That's all it is.

Black Hawk

#62. 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

#63. War is very simple, direct, and ruthless. It takes a simple, direct, and ruthless man to wage war.

George S. Patton

#64. There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws ... What is the difference between the two? ... An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#65. Some men still haven't come home from this war. And some men never will.

Teresa Medeiros

#66. Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#67. We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

Marcel Proust

#68. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."34

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#69. Marriage is like war - an experience that no adventurous man would evade, and no sensible man repeat.

Ursula Parrott

#70. The closest thing I could think of that men go through is like a prisoner of war being tortured, and then coming back from that experience. It's traumatic and grounding and makes you commit to the world. Also, because you want all of these things for your kid.

Larkin Grimm

#71. While no man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China, and such was never given a thought, the new situation did urgently demand a drastic revision of strategic planning if our political aim was to defeat this new enemy as we had defeated the old.

Douglas MacArthur

#72. While the Second World War brought about untold misery and suffering, it was also a time when the world witnessed extraordinary bravery. Through the collective, heroic efforts of countless men and women, victory was claimed over tyranny and evil.

Sam Kutesa

#73. Why,' said he, 'does not the emperor, who has devised so many clever and efficient modes of improving the art of war, organize a regiment of lawyers, judges and legal practitioners, sending them in the hottest fire the enemy could maintain, and using them to save better men?

Alexandre Dumas

#74. Sometimes the women much resent the men who call for war and have been known to rush upon them and beat them severely about the head and shoulders.

Peter Matthiessen

#75. Blood mixture and the result drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.

Adolf Hitler

#76. Without doubt, ferocious and disordered men are much weaker than timid and ordered ones. For order chases fear from men and disorder lessens ferocity.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#77. 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

#78. Though some men did not make war as others did, if they sold their goods for profit to the war-makers, did it make them better because the weapon was not in their own hands, if they had made the weapon and sold it and so put it into the hands of those used it upon the innocent?

Pearl S. Buck

#79. The women of Afghanistan, left behind as their men fought, did what the women of World War II did - used their wits and resourcefulness to preserve some semblance of civilization.

Tina Brown

#80. The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence

Bertrand Russell

#81. During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

Thomas Hobbes

#82. I have been a soldier all my life. I have commanded companies, I have commanded regiments. I have commanded divisions. And I have commanded even more. But there are no fifteen thousand men i the world that can go across that ground.

James Longstreet

#83. All war is murder, robbery, trickery, and no nation ever escaped losses of men, prosperity and virility. War knows no victor.

David Starr Jordan

#84. Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.

Thomas Carlyle

#85. We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.

Winston Churchill

#86. While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.

David R. Brower

#87. Other wars end eventually in victory, defeat or exhaustion, but the war between men and women goes on forever.

Alison Lurie

#88. 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.

#89. I'm not interested in going to see films that massively overrepresent men over women. It's lik,e how much more have we got to say about this? Like men in war and dealing with their masculinity in conflict. I just think we've exhausted the landscape.

Romola Garai

#90. It is the untold story of this war and it is the story of every war ever fought. Greedy men seeing someone weaker with something they want.

C.C. Humphreys

#91. The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn't who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies.

Robert Koger

#92. You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.

Henry A. Kissinger

#93. Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard.

Herman Melville

#94. If you will not have it thus: if in the pride of power, if in contempt of reason and reliance upon force, you say we shall not go, but shall remain as subjects to you, then, gentlemen of the North, a war is to be inaugurated the like of which men have not seen ...

Jefferson Davis

#95. With a nation at war against terrorism and our men and women on the front line defending our homeland from abroad, resources need to be prioritized and allocated properly.

Jeff Miller

#96. Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage, and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution.

Alec Guinness

#97. The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.

H.G.Wells

#98. Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war; and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.

Aristophanes

#99. The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit to tyranny.

Winston Churchill

#100. The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace

Ezra Pound