Top 100 Quotes About The Truth Of War
#1. There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.
Phil Klay
#2. The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.
Jon Krakauer
#3. NEVER allow the enemy to define your terms. If you want to win a war of propaganda, you must be able to manipulate language to expose the truth.
Jenifer Mohammed
#4. After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?
Umberto Eco
#5. If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know.
David Lloyd George
#6. If you go to war with your mind, you will always be at war.
T. Scott McLeod
#7. Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
Thomas Merton
#8. Peace is not only the absence of war, but the presence of harmony.
Debasish Mridha
#9. Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.
Sun Tzu
#10. If everyone practices the power of their love, there will be happiness and no war.
Debasish Mridha
#11. Basically all the religions,sciences and powers of the world boil down to a simple truth. The Best Story Teller will win in the end!
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#12. The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
George Orwell
#14. Love is always the first casualty of a religious war, the second is Truth and the third...Humanity.
Jason Versey
#15. But, to tell the truth, a soldier doesn't notice a war much more than a civilian does, except his own tiny piece of it and that just on the days it is happening.
Robert A. Heinlein
#16. Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.
Bertrand Russell
#17. Easier to demonize than to understand, and that's the truth on both sides of every war.
Plague Jack
#18. And if such malignity is hidden for a time, it proceeds from the unknown reason that would not be known because the experience of the contrary had not been seen, but time, which is said to be the father of every truth, will cause it to be discovered.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#19. We need to win by the power of love, not by the destruction of war.
Debasish Mridha
#20. Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.
Vera Brittain
#21. They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.
Alexander Cockburn
#22. If we must have heroes and wars whereinto make them, there is no war so brilliant as a war with the wrong, no hero so fit to be sung, as he who has gained the bloodless VICTORY of truth and mercy.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
#23. I must find Ecstasy in this Insanity
Freedom from their Slavery
The Truth in their Lies
Life in their Death
Beauty in their Homicidal Genocide
Peace in the War Whore's evil orgy of Death and Negation
Love amongst the Ruins
Pleasure in my own Pain.
Lydia Lunch
#24. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.
Albert Camus
#25. Do you think I'd start a war without knowing how to end it?"
"You've done it at least three times that I know of!"
"Ah sure, bring up the truth."
Caine and T'Passe
Matthew Woodring Stover
#27. Peace is inside us, it's a natural state of mind;
to find it, we create war, destroy the world like a blind.
Debasish Mridha
#28. While many people think that we as reporters are whining and that this is a time of war, we are really the conveyors of truth in a very critical time and people need to know that truth.
Judd Rose
#29. Dreams became issues of East versus West. Hopes became political rhetoric. Progress became a search for power and domination. Somewhere the truth was lost that people don't make war, governments do.
Ronald Reagan
#30. During the late war I had an infallible rule for deciding what Great Britain would do on every occasion. It was, to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do, and I can say with truth that I was never deceived.
Thomas Jefferson
#31. The story is about being loyal to the truth as a nation, that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their troops do in war, good or bad.
Kevin Sites
#32. Set between England and the Spanish Canary Islands, three women learn the truth about their shared past, and discover the importance of family. Spain, 1939. Following the wishes of her parents to keep her safe during the war, a young girl, Julia, enters a convent in Barcelona.
Rosanna Ley
#33. The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.
LeVar Burton
#34. Nothing gets us down more than watching violence on television or reading about war and brutality in the newspaper. The truth is, there's a massive reduction in the amount of violence around the world.
Peter Diamandis
#35. I have come to believe there is nothing in the lives of human beings more terrifying than war and nothing more important than for those of us who have experienced it to share its awful truth.
Ron Kovic
#36. To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.
Jacques Maritain
#37. It's a war of truths; everyone has his own truth, his own vision of the world. The truth with more firepower will win the day and reign supreme
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#38. War of words. We are influenced by the western media. But is what we hear the truth or just PR campaigns for governments?
Anne-Rae Vasquez
#39. It is often observed that the first casualty of war is truth, but how do you tell the truth without betraying the sacrifice of those who accepted the terms of battle? War is a sacrificial system that creates its own justification.
Stanley Hauerwas
#40. To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two.
Ewa Kopacz
#41. Now, where are [Mexican illegal immigrants] fleeing from? Mostly from Central America, where they're fleeing from the results of our policies.
Noam Chomsky
#42. Every citizen must be actively aware of, participating in, and overseeing research, and that research should be focused on creating prosperity and peace, not war and poverty or suicidal needs.
Transparency, which engenders truth, is the foundation for all this.
Robert David Steele
#43. You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night." "You, sir?" "God's truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that's not how it's going to be. And maybe that's why I cried.
Ray Bradbury
#44. There's no blade sharper than the truth under the Sun, it's enlightens the mind, releases the captives, condemns the guilty and spares the innocent; it's the only weapon a hero ever needs to fight a war, the one which is conducted without a need of any Iron blade!
Marcus L. Lukusa
#46. It was a brutal picture, a tug-of-war between two equal but opposing impulses. It had the ring of truth, however,
Deborah Harkness
#47. 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
#48. There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
Honore De Balzac
#50. It is impossible not to react to the current state of affairs through personal action and artistic production. We have been at war for three years. One desperately feels the need for someone to speak some sort of truth, either poetic or factual.
Casey Spooner
#51. Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.
Dean Koontz
#52. I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth.
Bob Graham
#53. The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. There were many ways of not burdening one's conscience, of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum. When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything.
Richard Von Weizsaecker
#55. How do we keep convincing young people to die in fights they didn't start for reasons we're too devious to tell the truth about? It's way too easy for governments to spend other people's blood. Maybe only the sons and daughters of those who declare the wars should be allowed to fight and die.
Dan Groat
#56. We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.
Walter Lippmann
#57. War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#58. He listened gravely to the discussion of possible danger, but in truth, he paid little heed. Silvanoshei was young, and the young know they will live forever.
Margaret Weis
#59. The figure knew that the coming events would begin with this night. The truth of the prophecy would lay a destiny far greater than any known to Dagmarth. A destiny for one child to embrace. It would bring change to this war and Dagmarth.
Joseph J. Miccolis
#60. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
Robert M. Pirsig
#61. The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.
Johann Hari
#62. Do you really think all angels are sweet and gentle? You must have forgot that the front lines of the War in Heaven were littered with bold women that had something to say.
Shannon L. Alder
#63. They forget that the vampaneze were once our brothers, that by destroying them, we destroy a part of ourselves. Most vampire never realize how pointless and savage war truly is. You were smart enough to see through the truth. Don't ever forget it.
Darren Shan
#64. There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bush's presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted 'from the gut,' and was economical with the truth until it disappeared.
Teju Cole
#65. In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.
Albert Camus
#66. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
Tim O'Brien
#67. Play the game of peace, not the war.
Play, not with gun, but with laughter.
Debasish Mridha
#68. There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.
Louis L'Amour
#69. We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II.
Warren Buffett
#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. It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.
L. Neil Smith
#72. [M]ore wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day.
Charles Kimball
#73. The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#74. Truth is always the first casualty of war.
Aeschylus
#75. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.
Marie Colvin
#76. If truth is the first victim of war, then read on - I've got some great lies for you this month.
Alan Gorrie
#77. Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.
Terry Pratchett
#78. Either Christ is a liar or war is never necessary, and very properly assuming that Christ told the truth, it follows that the State is without [in the words of Father Macksey] 'judicial authority to determine when war is necessary,' because it is never necessary.
Ben Salmon
#79. The first atrocity, the first war crime committed in any war of aggression by the aggressors is against the truth.
Michael Parenti
#80. There comes a time for each of us when we realize the truth about the enemy. Which is that he is not an idea, or some faceless demon. He is a man. And every man is much like ourselves.
Brian Van Reet
#81. To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies.
Harry M. Collins
#82. Some general officers should pay a stricter regard to truth than to call the depopulating other countries the service of their own.
Henry Fielding
#83. War is wrong. Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.
Bayard Rustin
#84. We are at war... The secret kind. The best kind. A war of shadows and mysteries... This is a fight for information, and for the truth.
Andrew Melvin
#85. The Devil fights from behind barricades of linguistic complexity, but the war of words will be won by those armed only with simplistic truths
Dean Cavanagh
#86. There are times for war - many times. But sometimes it's necessary to risk speaking the truth of our own vulnerabilities.
Andrea Cremer
#87. Then again, it didn't take me long in the world of corporate law to realize that truth is an afterthought in court. In fact, truth is an afterthought in most trials. But there were six million people who were lied to, during World War II, and somebody owes them the truth.
Jodi Picoult
#88. The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.
Georg Brandes
#89. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink
George Orwell
#90. Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#91. A DEAD STATESMAN
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
from EPITAPHS OF THE WAR 1914-18
Rudyard Kipling
#92. War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.
Bernard Cornwell
#93. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Alfred The Great
#95. If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. Pentagon official, on why US military censored graphic footage from the Gulf War In time of war the first casualty is truth.
Boake Carter
#96. Life is war. That's not all it is. But it is always that. Our weakness in prayer is owing largely to our neglect of this truth. Prayer is primarily a wartime walkie-talkie for the mission of the church as it advances against the powers of darkness and unbelief.
John Piper
#97. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.
Jodi Picoult
#98. 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
#99. Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.
Timothy Radcliffe
#100. To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game ... speak the truth and hear the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
