Top 100 Quotes About Modern War
#1. If you want to go anywhere in modern war, in the air, on the sea, on the land, you must have command of the air.
William Halsey
#2. Only a modern army will be able to fight a modern war.
Howard W. Koch
#3. 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
#4. The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
Ezra Pound
#5. Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
H.G.Wells
#6. I have every confidence in the ultimate success of our joint cause; but success in modern war requires something more than courage and a willingness to die: it requires careful preparation.
Douglas MacArthur
#7. Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.
Orlando Figes
#8. I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarously said, liquidating enemies, is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival
T. S. Eliot
#9. Modern war is the most highly developed of all sciences. We have perfected our weapons but failed to perfect the men who use them.
Billy Graham
#10. 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
#11. Resort to science has rendered modern war so destructive of life and property that it presents a new problem to mankind, such, that unless our civilization shall find some means of making an end to war, war will make an end to our civilization.
John Hessin Clarke
#12. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it.
Pierce Brown
#13. Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
Aldous Huxley
#14. In modern war there is no such thing as victor and vanquished ... There is only a loser, and the loser is mankind.
U Thant
#15. You must all be aware that modern war is not a mere matter of military operations. It involves the whole strength and all the resources of the nation. Not only soldiers, but also all citizens without exception, take part.
Chiang Kai-shek
#16. That we have ignored the lessons of modern war poetry speaks volumes to the lack of concern for that which we do not endure.
David McDonald
#17. remember the two signatures of modern war: (1) You never win, exactly; you claim victory. (2) Perception is paramount.
Mark Bowden
#19. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
William James
#20. Aviation is a dynamic profession. The rate of obsolescence of equipment is high and new aircraft have to be placed in inventory periodically in order to stay abreast of the requirements of modern war.
Keith B. McCutcheon
#21. So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.
James Dickey
#22. Modern war and modern civilisation are utterly incompatible ... one or the other must go.
Vera Brittain
#23. The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
Edward Abbey
#24. Whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.
Rebecca West
#25. Every modern war has had its roots in exploitation.
Helen Keller
#26. A nation's ability to fight a modern war is as good as its technological ability.
Frank Whittle
#27. They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. No big modern war has been won without preponderant sea power; and, conversely, very few rebellions of maritime provinces have succeeded without acquiring sea power.
Samuel Eliot Morison
#29. A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley
#30. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.
Steven Pinker
#31. Stop viewing China like it's the Cold War. Start viewing them as a modern member of the industrialized world.
James Packer
#32. A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.
George Bernard Shaw
#33. The Night Manager doesn't exist in the post-Cold war universe, it exists much more in the modern world, I think. There is more action. The bad guys don't have particularly political or national-political affiliations.
Tom Hiddleston
#34. Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)
Lois McMaster Bujold
#35. As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it.
Robert Heilbroner
#36. 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
#37. Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.
Sydney J. Harris
#38. 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
#39. Modern warfare is an intricate business about which no one knows everything and few know very much.
Frank Knox
#40. 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
#41. French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.
Naomi Wolf
#42. It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.
Tiffany Madison
#43. Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed.
Alexander Rodchenko
#44. The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
Barry Commoner
#46. 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
#47. As long as the same passions and interests subsist among mankind, the questions of war and peace, of justice and policy, which were debated in the councils of antiquity, will frequently present themselves as the subject of modern deliberation.
Edward Gibbon
#48. Albert Camus did not know he was summing up modern photojournalism when he wrote:Will I kill myself or have a cup of coffee
Sacha Hartgers
#49. The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is spared the sight of the corpses.
Teju Cole
#50. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#51. An ungentlemanly war it will be,' he grumbled. 'Will I lead my men with a sword? Ah, but no! I will lead my men with a dirty revolver in my hand. Parbleu! Such is modern warfare! A machine could do the whole cursed thing better -- we shall all be nothing but machines in this war.
Radclyffe Hall
#52. In modern political society it is probably a fact that national leadership can heighten foreign crises to the point where war becomes almost inevitable and public approval, at least for a time, automatic.
Arthur Ekirch
#53. It's understandable why someone would like their entertainment to provide an escape from modern day worries and the reality of war. We feel this record creates a healthy opportunity to process some of these emotions rather than deny them.
Eddie Vedder
#54. As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.
Tiffany Madison
#55. There has always been tension between reporters and the administration, particularly when it comes to war in the modern era. You can go to Kennedy or Johnson and see that they weren't happy with David Halberstam or Morley Safer.
Lowell Bergman
#56. The modern wars are also omnipresent in our electronic media - to be cynical about it, we now have 24 hours of non-stop bloodshed available to us. The internet and real-time media reporting were integrated into daily life in Iraq.
Dave Abrams
#57. Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system
Giorgio Agamben
#58. But the war proponents tried desperately to continue the glorification of war by praising anyone who had been sent off to war or even just put on a uniform. Troops and veterans were placed on pedestals as great heroes - warriors who had saved us from some imagined modern-day Hitler.
Ron Paul
#59. Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.
Asghar Farhadi
#60. The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.
Leo Strauss
#61. Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.
Winston S. Churchill
#62. And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went
W. H. Auden
#63. [The Soviets] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth; they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Ronald Reagan
#64. Modern psychology teaches that experience is not merely the best teacher, but the only possible teacher.. There is no war between theory and practice. The most valuable experience demands both, and the theory should supplement the practice and not precede it.
Charles Kettering
#65. Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II.
Eisaku Sato
#66. John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective - a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe.
Robert Charles Wilson
#67. It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace, and the people whom they represent, with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs, urging them forward to war.
Elihu Root
#68. Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.
George Will
#69. After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.
Harry Seidler
#71. The Olympics have been with the world since 776 B.C., and have only been interrupted by war, especially in the modern era.
Bill Toomey
#72. Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves more or less as a substitute for hatred between individuals.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#73. Divorce is one of the loneliest of modern rituals. Before, during, and after the actual culmination of the legal process it is an ordeal that rips people away from their roots, their important relationships, and a part of themselves. There is really nothing like it - except perhaps war.
Suzanne Gordon
#74. It was a ludicrous, insane situation in which modern fighting men, possessed all of the highly destructive engines of war, were ordered to attack a medieval fortress using no weapons that would destroy or harm it.
Dale Dye
#75. Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?
Woodrow Wilson
#76. I do not think that war is always wrong: sometimes it is necessary to stop a dictator, prevent massive human-rights abuses, or expel an invader. But I have also seen that in the modern world, civil wars are the greatest threat to humanitarian security.
Jonathan Powell
#77. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.
Henry A. Wallace
#78. Much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)
Sebastian Junger
#79. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
William James
#80. The whole kind of post-World War I settlement that formed the modern Middle East is in danger of collapsing, and we can - we, the United States, you know, the preeminent power in the world - we can say that we want to ignore that, but how long can we avert our gaze? And how long can we stay out?
Dexter Filkins
#81. What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted
Lin Yutang
#82. The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
Maya Lin
#83. The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.
Michael Pollan
#84. The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage. Even if were not talking about wars between nations or assaults on nature, there's still that aggressiveness that keeps us apart from each other and the problems we need to be working on.
Robert James Waller
#85. I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations.
Douglas MacArthur
#86. The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought.
Winston Churchill
#87. Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.
William Hazlitt
#88. While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam.
Brendan Sexton III
#89. The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.
David McCullough
#90. By Vietnam, the Jeep had given way to the helicopter, and it is hard to imagine a modern army fighting a war without this supremely adaptable workhorse.
Saul David
#91. It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?
Matt Haig
#92. Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#93. Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.
James Buchan
#94. The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.
Ulysses S. Grant
#95. The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as to direct the thought of most of the world - primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.
Noam Chomsky
#96. The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.
Philip Zaleski
#97. I've had a wonderful time in 'Foyle's War' and I don't mind being typecast. But I'm not prim. I'm chaotic, happy, and desperate to have some laughs. I'd love to do a comedy next, or something modern.
Honeysuckle Weeks
#98. Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.
Vannevar Bush
#99. The very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology.
Murray Rothbard
#100. In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.
Lee Kuan Yew
