Top 100 Quotes About Just War
#1. I am asked if I think the war was a just war ... how can I answer? I was a boy born and raised in beautiful Leningrad, a boy who loved his parents and went obediently to school. A boy who was yanked out of that life and dumped in a strange land where life followed different rules.
Vladislav Tamarov
#2. If America were in a just war I'd volunteer for the front line. I'd do the shuffling and win the war.
Muhammad Ali
#3. I personally am not a total pacifist. I do believe there is such a thing as a just war. I believe, for instance, the effort to destroy the Nazi regime militarily was justified military action.
Marianne Williamson
#4. A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
Alexander Cockburn
#6. There are many different ways of categorizing news. It doesn't have to be just war and famine and serious politics.
Piers Morgan
#7. The term 'just war' is an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny and oppression without killing huge numbers of people.
Howard Zinn
#8. We're trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks. And it's the only way to get people aware that peace is possible, and it isn't just inevitable to have violence. Not just war - all forms of violence.
John Lennon
#10. The detectives ransack the place with the passion of soldiers fighting a just war.
Aleksandar Hemon
#11. I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort.
Cornel West
#12. This was not a just war after all - it was just a war: yet another exercise in consecrated barbarity and sanctified slaughter.
James K. Morrow
#13. Some in my party threaten to send a message that they don't know a just war when they see it, and more broadly that they're not prepared to use our military strength to protect our security and the cause of freedom.
Joe Lieberman
#14. 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
#15. The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.
Michael Gove
#17. I cease not to advocate peace; even though unjust it is better than the most just war.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#18. 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
#19. A "just war" - if there could be such a thing - would not require conscription. Volunteers would be plentiful.
Ben Salmon
#20. Perhaps the greatest contribution that those of us who come from a Christian tradition can make is to throw out the old just-war theory, embrace the nonviolence of Jesus, refuse to kill one another, and truly follow his commandment to love our enemies.
Mairead Corrigan
#21. If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.
Thomas Paine
#22. The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman ... Every soldier is the same fallible breed of human that we are. The making of war, even the most necessary and 'just' war, hardens human hearts.
Stan Goff
#23. In her head is war
All the time just war
I put her to bed
I bring peace to the world
Darnell Lamont Walker
#24. The idea of resolving conflicts by killing people (which is what war is) is not a just thing, a just idea. In that sense there is no such thing as "just war". But to wage a given war may be a just action.
Peter Kreeft
#25. A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace.
Theodore Roosevelt
#26. Thomas Aquinas put forward the basis of modern just war theory, suggesting that war cannot be fought for personal gain and must be waged by a legitimate body, and that the overriding motive must be to secure peace.
DK Publishing
#27. I find it significant that most of the people who believe in just war have never fought in one; examples: Barack W. Bush and George H. Obama.
Michel Templet
#28. Africa the continent is not just what we see on the news. It's ... not AIDS, and it's not just war and poverty. It's so much more. It's an abundant continent, and Botswana is an abundant place.
Jill Scott
#30. The separation between the cyber and the physical worlds was disappearing. Cyberbullying was just bullying, and cyberwar was just war - the true age of cyber began when we started removing it as a descriptor.
Matthew Mather
#31. 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
#32. When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes
many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy.
It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money.
War is our century's prostitution.
T. S. Eliot
#33. Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on.
Billy Graham
#34. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#35. Just as the world war is no white man's war, but every man's war, so is the struggle for woman suffrage no white woman's struggle, but every woman's struggle.
Carrie Chapman Catt
#36. You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.
Tim O'Brien
#37. Now that the war is winding down, I want to say I do appreciate you fellows hanging around here - just for me.
Bob Hope
#38. May I just single out for salutations, on the 'anti-war' side: Pop Stars For Appeasement, Dancers Against Democracy, Actors For Apathy, Fashionistas For Fascism and Jugglers For Genocide. All of them united under that flaccid flag of convenience, Show-Offs For Saddam.
Julie Burchill
#39. 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.
#40. Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#41. Thus the skilful general conducts his army just as though he were leading a single man, willy-nilly, by the hand.
Sun Tzu
#42. We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.
Neil Sheehan
#43. I get why no one bothers with the usual rules," ... "I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what's the point?" ... "Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else.
Paula McLain
#44. 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
#45. I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.
John F. Kerry
#46. Just because war is hell doesn't mean you can't have a little fun.
Chris Kyle
#47. These are the only moments that we have left. These precious seconds where the passion blots out everything else, and it is just us.
The rest is a war neither of us can ever win.
But, I already waved my white flag.
I have already surrendered.
Amanda Grace
#48. Humans were still just a bunch of bipedal apes, divided into arbitrary tribes that were constantly at war over their ruined planet's dwindling natural resources.
Ernest Cline
#49. You look concerned."
"Just that if you've started another war, I'd like a heads-up is all."
"The level of confidence you have in my diplomatic skills is overwhelming."
"What diplomatic skills?
Michael J. Sullivan
#50. Rebel Number Four" is waiting patiently by the door. I named him "Rebel Number Four," for he is the fourth of his kind I have given the name "Rebel." To many he may be just a hound dog, but to me he is a champion and a friend to the end.
Nancy B. Brewer
#51. I will defend Korea as I would my own country-just as I would California.
Douglas MacArthur
#52. The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.
Catherynne M Valente
#53. Just when you think this war has taken everything you loved, you meet someone and realize that somehow you still have more to give.
Ruta Sepetys
#54. Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.
Nicholson Baker
#55. I think soldiers are not just one homogenous group, just like Americans aren't. They all have different feelings about the war.
Emily Robison
#56. I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
Luc Delahaye
#57. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.
Alasdair Gray
#58. 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
#59. I'm in the infantry. What you just showed me, for us that's not even good pornography.
Henry V. O'Neil
#60. Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Vietnam.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#61. Without just cause of reason, without legal or moral justification, and without a thread of proof that Iraq directly threatens the security of the United States, the Bush administration has headed to war ...
Zack De La Rocha
#62. Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.
Elizabeth Wein
#63. Garahel always used to say that heroism was just another word for horror, and maybe a worse one. A hero always feels that he has to do what's right. Sometimes that leads to tormenting himself with doubt long after the deed is done.
Liane Merciel
#64. Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.
Edmund Burke
#65. Do you guys ever think about how Hitler has affected the whole world? That just one man did all this? I mean, what if he had been a good man, instead?
Elizabeth Berg
#66. Had my first son this morning ... well, actually, my wife had him. I just caught him. Wo. Heart expanding way faster than my brain ... If you could bottle up and distribute this feeling, I swear there'd be no more war.
James Van Der Beek
#67. Modern war is fought by a number of strong, sweaty horsemen with constipation, who have their eyes on power, on wealth and on glory, and who obey the rules just when it pleases them.
Dorothy Dunnett
#68. World War II has always been of great interest to me. I've known for decades that it was just one more war the politicians suckered us into.
Harry Browne
#69. We adapted to being at war, just as we had adapted to the chaos and upheaval of revolution. How amazing and yet tragic it is, I thought, the human instinct for
Shirin Ebadi
#70. Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.
John Berger
#71. I have the manual, and the sad thing is that many of the techniques are exactly the same ones with a few enhancements by the US since World War II. So the role of our European allies and others has just really disappointed me greatly.
Ray McGovern
#72. 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
#73. It's very hard to understand just what our strategy is in Syria, frankly, and on Iraq that this is Iraq's war, that the role of the United States is to help Iraq, to arm, train, support, provide air support, but this has to be Iraq's war.
David Ignatius
#74. It's been so amazing. I've always struggled with this barrier that I felt like I'd had up until blogging came along. Just one comment from somebody really sparks something in me. It doesn't need to be this huge war between me and the listeners anymore. I really thrive on that.
Imogen Heap
#75. It's a beautiful war, baby." He dipped so close, the tips of our noses brushed but his eyes never left mine. "And I ... just ... won.
Kristen Ashley
#76. I think I'm just someone that just tries to get by. I'm kind of - if it was during the Second World War, I'd be a black marketeer, I think.
Craig Ferguson
#77. It's not just the war itself. It's what you do after the war and what structure you put in place and how you make that structure work.
John Hewson
#78. 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
#79. We are not enemies but we are just hostile to each other because of our different views and opinions.
Auliq Ice
#81. So do your duty, boys, and join with prideServe your country in her suicideFind the flags so you can wave goodbyeBut just before the end even treason might be worth a tryThis country is too young to dieI declare the war is overIt's over, it's over.
Phil Ochs
#82. War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.
Russell Crowe
#83. Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger
#84. Right now it's just me and my impatience having a silent war at the dinner table.
Colleen Hoover
#85. Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies)-just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden on the rest.
Kenneth Kaunda
#86. The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.
Harold Holzer
#87. Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins.
Rob Thomas
#88. Politics and war were just different names for power, and the price of power was predictably high and could be precisely measured-in dollards,yen,euros,rubles,riyals, and blood.
Tara Janzen
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. To where? We don't know. To do what? We don't know either. No one tells us anything. We just follow orders.
Derrick Wolf
#93. We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.
Laura Hillenbrand
#94. All I could think was that he, too, was going to war; that he, too, was leaving Deyning, leaving my world. I'd only just found him, only just realized that the universe included someone named Tom Cuthbert and now he was about to disappear. It seemed already the war had found me.
Judith Kinghorn
#95. I love you, Callie. The war is over, but" - He smiled, a crooked, rueful, tender smile - "my life is just beginning," he told her.
Heather Graham
#96. The kids are saying 'Make Love, Not War',
and I'm beginning to think they're right.
For war costs millions of dollars a day,
and love
just a few bucks a night!
Nipsey Russell
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. [S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically.
Nel Noddings
#100. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.
Gustave De Molinari
