On A War Quotes

#1. What, did he think I was just going to melt into his arms? Start a tragic and dramatic tale of star-crossed lovers on a war-torn planet?

Amie Kaufman

#2. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#3. One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

George Packer

#4. When an administration embarks on a war justified by little or no intelligence, speaking the truth can be regarded as treachery. The country could use more of that kind of "treachery".

Ray McGovern

#5. But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.

Aldous Huxley

#6. No Swaraj government with any pretension to being a popular government can possibly be organised and maintained on a war-footing.

Mahatma Gandhi

#7. We need to be on a war footing. We need to understand that our nation is in grave danger.

Benjamin Carson

#8. As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

James Fallows

#9. The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship.

Steven Pinker

#10. Spain also suffered an invasion of a foreign race, but she pulled herself together and sustained herself on a war-footing for seven centuries.

Emilia Pardo Bazan

#11. I am not carrying on a war of extermination against the Romans. I am contending for honor and empire. My ancestors yielded to Roman valour. I am endeavouring that others, in their turn, will be obliged to yield to my good fortune, and my valour.

Hannibal

#12. If we are to teach real peace in the world, and if we are to carry on a war against war, we have to begin with the children. -Mahatma Ghandi

Michael Gallegos Borresen

#13. Humans without humanity, A world of dread and fear for eternity.

Mouloud Benzadi

#14. I found that I was getting a warm reception for my message of freeing you from the income tax, releasing you from Social Security, ending the insane war on drugs, restoring gun rights, and reducing the federal government to just its constitutional functions.

Harry Browne

#15. I averted my eyes, looked around, and stumbled through all the faces in the room till they finally rested on his. He was standing like a scared bird, waving one wing and using the other to hide his scar. Aya Rabah- Scars

Refaat Alareer

#16. Move over, Helen of Troy; Jenny Trout is going to wage a war on good health and fit bodies!

Jennifer Armintrout

#17. We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we will not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace

Martin Luther King Jr.

#18. Of course, it's wonderful to film any period piece - but especially 'Foyle's War' because the art direction is so imaginative and yet at the same time so real. You can open a drawer on set, and even though the camera never sees what's inside, it'll be filled with genuine 1940s documents.

Honeysuckle Weeks

#19. Standing on the defensive indicates insufficient strength; attacking, a superabundance of strength.

Sun Tzu

#20. When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

Barry Eisler

#21. War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves.

Rosanne Cash

#22. The American way of war is to build an army, then another, then a third, while building fleets. If the war is still on at that point we smash.

Jerry Pournelle

#23. How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?

Howard Zinn

#24. 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

#25. I give [Barack Obama] a 10 [on a scale of 1 to 10] because he's not God, and he inherited a couple of wars, and a financial mess.I want to see him curse somebody out on TV. You can't finesse a bull. He's gotta throw down. He's in the shark tank.

Tracy Morgan

#26. The war on drugs was an ideology the government came up with, and there never really was a war on drugs. I mean, to stop the importation of drugs into the United States of America is an impossibility.

George Jung

#27. [On John Brown:] The poor wretch is hanged, but from his grave a root of bitterness will spring, the fruit of which at no distant day may be disunion and civil war.

Fanny Kemble

#28. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world.

Bertrand Russell

#29. We are in a war on terrorism. We need to conduct that war and take it to the terrorists, not here at home.

Craig L. Thomas

#30. The importance of fear as a factor in war-making cannot be overlooked, and can hardly be overestimated. Any politician can play on panic when he wishes to stampede a people into war.

Maude Royden

#31. DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger told Whit Burnett... that on D-Day he was carrying six chapters of 'The Catcher in the Rye', that he needed those pages with him not only as an amulet to help him survive but as a reason to survive.

Shane Salerno

#32. It's changed dramatically in our lifetimes. Communism is gone, so now the global war is framed in religious terms. Fundamentalist religion is rampant on all sides of this war. It casts a very dark shadow over non-fundamentalist religion.

Zachary Lazar

#33. Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.

Thomas Sowell

#34. Is there a word for the moment you win tug-of-war? When the weight gives, and all that extra rope comes hurtling towards you, how even though you've won, you still end up with muddy knees and burns on your hands? Is there a word for that? I wish there was.

Sarah Kay

#35. In a free society, how can you commit a crime against yourself?

Jesse Ventura

#36. The conduct of President Bush's war of choice has been plagued with incompetent civilian leadership decisions that have cost many lives and rendered the war on and occupation of Iraq a strategic policy disaster for the United States.

John Olver

#37. And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

Gerald Scarfe

#38. Long before 9/11 and the war in Iraq, a lot of people hated the United States and the West. But what the Iraqi war seems to have done, at least in ... I mean, I'm just reporting what I see from the people on the ground, is that it has silenced many pro-American forces in the Muslim world.

Yaroslav Trofimov

#39. Four hundred thousand South Africans are dying of AIDS every year. This makes the war on Iraq look like a birthday party.

Jeremy Cronin

#40. The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don't back out of a contract merely because you've changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you're being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.

Pat Barker

#41. Afghanistan and Iraq were lumped together in what was called a 'global war on terrorism.'

Richard Engel

#42. Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.

Bruce Jackson

#43. Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.

Randy Thornhorn

#44. Because we are in a war situation, this can sometimes be dangerous work. But guys like A.D. Flowers and his technicians just take it in stride and get on with the job. In four years, we've never had a serious accident or injury working with all the explosions.

Vic Morrow

#45. I spent some of my endless hours of leisure learning how to shoot a gun, which I thought might come in handy someday, if not in the war then back on the streets of New York.

Meg Rosoff

#46. The only sign of war was a cloud of dust migrating from east to west. It looked through the windows, trying to find a way inside, and as it simultaneously thickened and spread, it turned the trail of humans into apparitions. There were no people on the street anymore. They were rumors carrying bags.

Markus Zusak

#47. I don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.

Avril Lavigne

#48. The two-war strategy was a product of the cold war, when we had to have the ability to fight the Russians on the plains of Europe and fight the Chinese on the Korean peninsula at the same time. That costs an awful lot of money.

Joe Klein

#49. Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.

Nick Turse

#50. There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains) and Bush the Elder.

Andrew Tobias

#51. The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them: We have to abide their outcome in the dark.

Thucydides

#52. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6

Erich Maria Remarque

#53. Being a soldier [in the wars of modern power politics] was like being on a team in a sport that drew no crowds, except for the players' own parents and friends.

Dan Wakefield

#54. All I know, is that I feel extremely blessed to be on TV. It's a hard job, but real life is harder. Truth be told, playgrounds can be war zones.

Atticus Shaffer

#55. No matter how fast weapons and technology evolve in the 21st century, one thing remains constant is that war is a human endeavor, a grueling contest between two learning and adaptive forces. Victory, therefore rests on how smart, how tough, and how dedicated our boots on the ground.

Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono

#56. I grew up in somewhat of a war zone in West Philadelphia in 1985, '86. It wasn't as extreme as someone coming in the classroom and just unloading on a class, but I knew to take the scenic route to go to the grocery store to avoid certain elements.

Questlove

#57. I am asking the Congress, which represents the people, to declare a war on ISIS so that we can begin the process of excising that cancer and begin the healing process, and bring peace, prosperity, and safety back to America.

Benjamin Carson

#58. Don't see so much, Chris, your mind is too big for your body.' I got a war on between a mind that wants things my body can't give it." Priory

Ray Bradbury

#59. After all, you can't really blame the Waffen S.S. for doing what comes naturally. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground.

Garth Ennis

#60. I was the first blogger on the 'Times's website. That happened during the Iraq war, when I wanted an outlet for the things I was seeing every day that couldn't fit into just two columns a week. Then I became interested in using multimedia, specifically as a way to engage young people.

Nicholas Kristof

#61. I believe serious progress (in the abolition of war) can be achieved only when men become organized on an international scale and refuse, as a body, to enter military or war service.

Albert Einstein

#62. War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

Jeannette Rankin

#63. You know, my dad was a lieutenant colonel at Ft. Lewis on the 3rd of March, 1941. Fifteen months later, he was commanding a theater of war.

John Eisenhower

#64. If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

Louis Lecoin

#65. [On World War II:] The war, which destroyed so much of everything, was also constructive, in a way. It established clearly the cold, and finally unhypocritical fact that the most important thing on earth to men today is money.

Janet Flanner

#66. I think a lot of Americans have never been all that hungry. They've never had war on their shore, and they've never suffered the way other cultures have suffered. I'm not saying we should go suffer. Not at all. I'm saying we should be more aware of how other cultures exist.

Henry Rollins

#67. All that is needed to set us definitely on the road to a Fascist society is war. It will of course be a modified form of Fascism at first.

John T. Flynn

#68. It's bewildering to me how you can just start chatting with a complete stranger on Facebook, and - next thing you know - it seems as if there's some intense connection with the person - or at least you feel that closeness and hope it's mutual

Zack Love

#69. 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

#70. The Beatles were huge for me, ... I used to jump around the room to the red album, the one with all the early hits on it. It made you feel euphoric. It was a sensation I couldn't get from anything else, whether it was playing football, swimming or even seeing 'Star Wars.'

Alex Kapranos

#71. I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN's Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command.

Stan Goff

#72. Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

Bill Kristol

#73. There are no war stories. I ended up a bombardier, but I never got overseas. And it wasn't because I was playing baseball either. It was just a series of things that went on.

Bobby Thomson

#74. Would the media insist on having a Holocaust-denier to balance any report about the Second Word War?

Caroline Lucas

#75. In terms of any sacrifices at the time [of World War II], I was somewhat protected living on a small farm where there was food, different perhaps from living in a city environment. I know such things as gas rationing did exist, but it wasn't anything that interfered with my daily activity.

Paul Smith

#76. This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

A. N. Wilson

#77. Our kingdom is our life, and our life is our kingdom. We are all meant to rule from a glorious place. When God is on the throne, then so are we. When God is in exile, our lands are at war and our kingdoms are in chaos.

Marianne Williamson

#78. This is a war between good and evil. And we have made it clear to the world that we will stand strong on the side of good, and we expect other nations to join us. This is not a war between our world and their world. It is a war to save the world.

George W. Bush

#79. Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov's habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.

Neal Stephenson

#80. Instead of war on poverty,
they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.

Tupac Shakur

#81. Artillery raining fire on his tiny village Jabla on the Line of Control (LoC). War has numbed him, so has devastation. Yet nothing had prepared him for the havoc of Saturday morning. He was taking a nap, having had his pre-dawn Ramzan meal. At first there

Anonymous

#82. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans ... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

Norman Mailer

#83. Now, you mummy's darlings, get a rift on them boots. Definitely shine em, my little curly-headed lambs, for in our mob, war or no war, you die with clean boots on.

Gerald Kersh

#84. Right after we invaded Iraq, I put a sign on my lawn that said "War is not the answer." That sign was either defaced, ripped up, or stolen every week. I had to replace that sign twelve times.

Paul Haggis

#85. Most people here agree that the rhetoric got overblown on both sides of the Atlantic before the Iraq war, and it was a disagreement among friends over the timing, not the substance, of the Iraq war.

John S. Tanner

#86. Since we're living with antibiotic drugs and chlorinated water and antibacterial soap and all these factors in our contemporary lives that I'd group together as a 'war on bacteria,' if we fail to replenish [good bacteria], we won't effectively get nutrients out of the food we're eating.

Sandor Katz

#87. 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

#88. You've remained on the battleground, center stage, experiencing life and, what's more important, experiencing yourself experiencing it. You haven't been reduced to a logistical strategy for somebody else's life-war.

Tom Robbins

#89. To other women the choice of clothes was a form of ingenious exhibition, a shameless seduction. To me, dresses were like a breastplate that I put on to set off to war against this life.

Shan Sa

#90. These are busy times for the Border Patrol, the customs agents, immigration folks; but if we are going to send these agencies to fight a war on drugs, to fight a war against illegal behavior, we have to send them the proper tools.

Bob Filner

#91. When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

Ben Shahn

#92. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history ... On every level - moral, strategic, military and economic - Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

Tomas Young

#93. Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.

Shannon L. Alder

#94. We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.

Gore Vidal

#95. A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.

Christopher Hitchens

#96. Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

Andrew Sullivan

#97. They had the lure of the Wal-Mart volume," [Jim] Wier said. "Once you get hooked on the volume, it's like getting hooked on cocaine. You've created a monster for yourself.

Charles Fishman

#98. Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. I am glad he is now on trial for crimes against humanity. But, opposition to a dictator is not the measure I use when deciding whether to send our men and women in uniform off to war and possible death.

Peter DeFazio

#99. Peace requires the provision of a platform for discussion and the exchange of information on matters and activities relevant to the prevention of armed violence.

Widad Akreyi

#100. If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.

Jefferson Davis