Old War Quotes

#1. If you look at Republicans, they always run these old war horses.

Foster Friess

#2. Tea, pa! said Charlotte, starting at the word like the old war-horse who hears the bugle; and we got down to it.

P.G. Wodehouse

#3. Normally, if you have a huge category that leads a bear market all the way down to the bottom - like tech after 2000, or energy in the '80-'82 bear market - you get one quick pop, and then years of lag as we fight the old war.

Kenneth Fisher

#4. I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time.

David Friedman

#5. Like mortars in old war films, they are often ready to destroy the opponent's unsupported defences.

Alexey Suetin

#6. The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win.

Lawrence Lessig

#7. A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so - whatever the last year was for the New York World's Fair.

Kurt Vonnegut

#8. In an old war, everybody has an ax to grind.

Arundhati Roy

#9. The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet, unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any struggle, but with naive and lighthearted gaiety.

Leo Tolstoy

#10. The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the "creative" is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

May Sarton

#11. I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

George S. McGovern

#12. 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

#13. In 1940 I was just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight and become heroes.

Woody Allen

#14. And did you ever stop to think that im old enough to go to war but i aint old enough to drink.

Tupac Shakur

#15. I had old bunk beds that my dad got from Seabrook Farms. They were first used by German prisoners during World War II, who were sent to work the farms during the war. The metal beds with their thin mattresses could easily be used as a jungle gym and I loved them.

David Mixner

#16. When I was a young man, I was poor. In a war with other nations, I was in eighty-seven fights. There I received my name and was made Chief of my nation. But now I am old and am for peace.

Red Cloud

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. These descendants divined myths in what was really history, for true memories were forgotten in chaos as vast arrays of daivi astras used in the Great War ravaged the land. That war destroyed almost everything. It took centuries for India to regain its old cultural vigour and intellectual depth.

Amish Tripathi

#20. But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favor of all-out war for other Americans to fight.

Gore Vidal

#21. Most people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world's Jews were killed during World War II, but not that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished, among them many who had kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.

Diane Ackerman

#22. Well old man, I guess freedom's a continuum.

Nicholas Hochstedler

#23. War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.

Ruth Benedict

#24. The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#25. Before it began to open new wounds, the war healed quite a few old ones: it shook us out of our lethargy, our life took on new meaning, we no longer lived without a purpose, eating and sleeping and excreting like animals.

Costas Taktsis

#26. Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor. In

Nathaniel Philbrick

#27. This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#28. There's going to be a horrible war. It's all going to happen. The Disc is too old to take it this time. Everything's been worn too thin. Doom, darkness and destruction bear down on us. The Apocralypse is nigh.

Terry Pratchett

#29. Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

Philip Caputo

#30. Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.

Richard Norton Smith

#31. Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.

Donald Hall

#32. When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

Amanda Lindhout

#33. Zeus it seems has given us from youth to old age a nice ball of wool to wind-nothing but wars upon wars until we shall perish every one.

Homer

#34. There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes.
(King Pelles the Sure)

Peter S. Beagle

#35. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Tim O'Brien

#36. The war is like an actress who is getting old. It's less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous. (1944)

Robert Capa

#37. Old soldiers never die - they're just thrown on the scrap heap!

Pat Mills

#38. The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

Jim Harrison

#39. The same fight was being waged, here the Nazis and there the Middle World; but in both places, Chaos against Law, something old and wild and blind at war with man and the works of man.

Poul Anderson

#40. Leonid Breznev was an old man and despite his own military experience in World War II, he on the other hand was not very close to the military.

Helmut Schmidt

#41. Show me a woman content with her figure and I'll show you a seven-year-old girl. Everybody else is engaged in the war against flab.

Polly Bergen

#42. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians.

Chris Hedges

#43. The tactic of leading people into ... a war that doesn't make any sense by telling them they are under attack, and if they raise any objection they're unpatriotic, is a very old tactic. And it doesn't intimidate me.

Tommy Lee Jones

#44. 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

#45. And when there is the possibility of peace, a new fight erupts, based on an old complaint, and which some people call justice adn others madness.

Nuruddin Farah

#46. Dublin was hardly worried by the war; her old preoccupations were still preoccupations. The intelligentsia continued their parties; their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever.

Louis MacNeice

#47. What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read.

Newt Gingrich

#48. War is the game played by old men with the lives of the young

Wilbur Smith

#49. Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.

Andy Rooney

#50. Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms ...

Simone Weil

#51. As a result of the World War, this old Germany collapsed. It collapsed in its constitution, in its social order, in its economic structure. Its thinking and feeling changed.

Gustav Stresemann

#52. I don't believe in singles. The singles market has changed. I am trying to get back to the old days of releasing albums at will, like Star Wars coming out again.

Prince

#53. War isn't a TV show with plot twists to keep the viewers interested. The proliferation of images and blanket media coverage have suffocated the life out of old-style photojournalism.

David Burnett

#54. Trying to change old habits is like fighting a war in your head - a draining and exhausting skirmish that makes you wonder at your chance of survival.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#55. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple
hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

Mccann Colum

#56. The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

David Hackworth

#57. Star Wars - the movie I saw 12 times as a 17-year-old. The movie that began a cultural and creative universe that now spans generations. For me to be a part of this in The Clone Wars is a dream come true.

Clancy Brown

#58. After World War II, a lot of people moved to the cities for work and abandoned the old vineyards. Then in the 1950s and 1960s, wineries were paid to produce volume at a cheap price. That's when the Lambruscos and bad Chianti were popular.

Joe Bastianich

#59. The First World War killed fewer victims than the Second World War, destroyed fewer buildings, and uprooted millions instead of tens of millions - but in many ways it left even deeper scars both on the mind and on the map of Europe. The old world never recovered from the shock.

Edmond Taylor

#60. What terrifies the Golds is simple, cruel, and as old as mankind itself. Civil war.

Pierce Brown

#61. It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

Elie Wiesel

#62. I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.

George Takei

#63. I should deem a man-of-war incomplete without a body of Marines ... imbued with that esprit that has so long characterized the "Old Corps."

Joshua R. Sands

#64. War is rich old men protecting their property by sending middle class and lower class young men off to die. It always has been.

George Carlin

#65. In 'Tarahumara' land, there was no crime, war or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn't get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: 50-year-olds outran teenagers.

Christopher McDougall

#66. The call to "take the land" ... is not a call to a new political, cultural or geographical dominance. It is Kingdom of God territory. It is the will of the Eternal God being done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Ken Baker

#67. This is war: Boys flung into a breach Like shoveled earth; And old men, Broken, Driving rapidly before crowds of people In a glitter of silly decorations. Behind the boys And the old men, Life weeps, And shreds her garments To the blowing winds.

Amy Lowell

#68. To an old leader will be born an idiot heir, weak both in knowledge and in war.

Nostradamus

#69. Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old.

Lewis H. Lapham

#70. War I abhor, and yet how sweet The sound along the marching street Of drum and fife, and I forget Wet eyes of widows, and forget Broken old mothers, and the whole Dark butchery without a soul.

Seneca The Younger

#71. The reason I make movies now has a lot to do with having seen Star Wars when I was seven years old. That's the formative movie-going experience of my life.

Chris Weitz

#72. Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

Erica Jong

#73. I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.

Kurt Vonnegut

#74. This war is like an actress who is getting old. It is less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous.

Robert Capa

#75. I've lost a lot of battles, but I've never lost sight of the war. My goal is to fight my way to a day when we're old and gray and she looks at me and says 'I'm glad you never gave up.' Until then, I fight. No retreat, baby. No surrender.

Hank Moody

#76. And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#77. Here indeed is a major difference between people and ants: where we send our young men to war, ants send their old ladies. No moral lesson there, unless you are looking for a less expensive form of elder care.

Edward O. Wilson

#78. The boy was the sun in Coriane's sky. On hard days, he split the darkness. On good days, he lit the world. When Tibe went away to the front, for weeks at a time now that the war ran hot again, Cal kept her safe. Only a few months old and better than any shield in the kingdom.

Victoria Aveyard

#79. I will never joke about old soldiers who try to get to reunions to talk over the war again. To talk of old times with old friends is the greatest thing in the world.

Will Rogers

#80. When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere.

Geoffrey West

#81. I did not go to Boston, for with regard to that place I sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go. No, I have a real genius for staying at home.

Henry David Thoreau

#82. Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars. (Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio-1986)

James Clavell

#83. Our civilization appears to've fallen so deeply into the habit of invasion that we cannot even obey a simple order of the Imperium without the old ways cropping up.

Frank Herbert

#84. O great corrector of enormous times, Shaker of o'er-rank states, thou grand decider Of dusty and old titles, that healest with blood The earth when it is sick, and curest the world O' the pleurisy of people.

John Fletcher

#85. Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the "legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago." There are new-born fanaticisms. Convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#86. In hard times of severe crisis if you want to create new jobs, I recommend you to start killing some people. It's the old "topos" of war in time of peace.

William C. Brown

#87. I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.

Sam Phillips

#88. Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems.

Art Hoppe

#89. Was your old man in the war?"
"He was in the air force. He built runways."
"The fucking air farce. He ever tell you about it? Did he live?"
"Yes, he lived. He spoke once about Vietnam."
"If he only spoke about it once, he wasn't lying.

Anthony Swofford

#90. Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises
War and Shopping
simply will not work.

Arundhati Roy

#91. Ain't nothing too serious. Even death is a joke on the old devil, if we are living for the Lord.

Nancy B. Brewer

#92. Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

Ezra Pound

#93. Those who have experienced the most, have suffered so much that they have ceased to hate. Hate is more for those with a slightly guilty conscience, and who by chewing on old hate in times of peace wish to demonstrate how great they were during the war.

Thor Heyerdahl

#94. I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.

Dan Rather

#95. Games? War is not a game, my friend. Games are for small children and old men like me. War is a young man's blighted delight

Renee Ahdieh

#96. They are a doomed race. Wars, smallpox, gross immorality, a change from old ways to new ways their fate is the common fate of the American, whether he sails the sea in the North, gallops over the plain in the West, or sleeps in his hammock in the forests of Brazil.

George Amos Dorsey

#97. Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

Graham Greene

#98. Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

James Jones

#99. War is a dumb game thought out by men when they become too old to play cowboys and crooks.

Irma Joubert

#100. The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.

Hannah Arendt