Quotes About Defeat In War

#1. A defeat in war is not the greatest of all evils; but when the defeat has been inflicted by enemies who are not worthy of you, then the calamity is doubled.

Aeschines

#2. Unquestionably, victory or defeat in war is determined mainly by the military, political, economic and natural conditions on both sides. But not by these alone. It is also determined by each side's subjective ability in directing the war.

Mao Zedong

#3. I've often observed that men and women who were young children during these years [of defeat in war] have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little laughter in their childhoods.

Arthur Golden

#4. Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces.

Merrill McPeak

#5. The most important thing in our war preparations is to teach all our people to hate U.S. imperialism. Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority.

Kim Il-sung

#6. This is the moment of your defeat; you have just put in the last nails in the coffin of communism.

Lech Walesa

#7. A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.

Leo Tolstoy

#8. He'd thought it would be the right thing to say, but she scoffed a little ... and that, more than anything - more than the prospect of having his ribs crushed in or his face pulled off or his neck stretched on a rope - scared him out of his wits.

V.S. Carnes

#9. Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

Nathan Myhrvold

#10. When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.

Charles Eisenstein

#11. The issue of Palestine has been there since more than 60 years. But more important since 1967 when the war was, ended in the defeat of some Arab countries.

Al-Waleed Bin Talal

#12. It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

Mark Lawrence

#13. Our armies were in as much chaos in victory as theirs in defeat.

Jefferson Davis

#14. I study the chessboard and concede defeat.
"You can gain yourself in five moves" says the Colonel. "Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.

Haruki Murakami

#15. Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.

Kenneth Waltz

#16. Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.

John Steinbeck

#17. Moviewise, I would love to make the story of princess Erendira. She was a 16 year old princess/warrior who led her tribe in war against the Spanish around 1513. She almost defeated them, and the Tarascans were the only tribe the Aztecs couldn't defeat.

Tamara Feldman

#18. Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.

Andrew Roberts

#19. In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad

Pamela Geller

#20. If no war in heaven, then defeat ain't misery.

Toba Beta

#21. Resort to force in the Great War (I) failed to bring tranquillity. Victory and defeat alike were sterile. That lesson the world should have learned.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#22. War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests.

Germaine Greer

#23. In the art of war, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the approaching battles. But if you know only yourself and not the enemy, for every victory, there will also be defeat.

Emily Thorne

#24. Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

Ernest Hemingway,

#25. A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#26. Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.

Yasser Arafat

#27. If the war has faded into history, democracy's defeat in Vietnam has left deep marks in the consciousness of both nations.

Nguyen Cao Ky

#28. After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat.

Martha Gellhorn

#29. As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#30. 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

#31. With Midway as the turning point, the fortunes of war appeared definitely to shift from our own to the Allied side. The defeat taught us many lessons and impelled our Navy, for the first time since the outbreak of war, to indulge in critical self-examination.

Mitsuo Fuchida

#32. Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

Conrad Black

#33. War is grounded in the notion of triumph and defeat. It is zero-sum.

Bruce Jackson

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

Alison Lurie

#35. In battle, it is not the strongest or the bravest or those with the greater numbers who win. Victory belongs to the side that best understands the price of defeat.

Shatrujeet Nath

#36. Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease - that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#37. The general that hearkens to my counsel and acts upon it, will conquer: let such a one be retained in command! The general that hearkens not to my counsel nor acts upon it, will suffer defeat: - let such a one be dismissed!

Sun Tzu

#38. In a similar way, The Art of War pinpoints anger and greed as fundamental causes of defeat.

Sun Tzu

#39. We must take the long view - every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.

Nathanael West

#40. The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

John T. Flynn

#41. We shall then defeat the whole lot of them in one go!

Edward I Of England

#42. Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.

Michael Ignatieff

#43. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory is won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.

Sun Tzu

#44. In War: Resolution,
In Defeat: Defiance,
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will.

Winston S. Churchill

#45. Our brave men and women have made many sacrifices in just wars to defeat the forces of evil. We have exported our greatest values: freedom and opportunity, which have lifted millions out of poverty. At home, these values allow Americans to use their God-given potential and make their dreams reality.

Marco Rubio

#46. War, in some ways, is merciful to men. It makes them heroes if they are the victors. If they are the vanquished - they do not live to see their homes taken, their wives widowed. But if you are a woman - you must live through defeat...

Samhita Arni

#47. LOGOMACHY, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem - a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

Ambrose Bierce

#48. The battle of Iwo Island has been won. The United States Marines by their individual and collective courage have conquered a base which is as necessary to us in our continuing forward movement toward final victory as it was vital to the enemy in staving off ultimate defeat.

Chester W. Nimitz

#49. Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat atheistic communism.

Ernest Becker

#50. 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

#51. Every day there is a war inside your mind: A war between you and yourself! One side of you may defeat the other side of you! But you must know that your winning side might fail in the real world! Always be ready to give a chance immediately to your losing side, to your defeated idea!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#52. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.

Douglas MacArthur

#53. The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands

Sun Tzu