Top 78 Quotes About Total War
#1. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
John Hersey
#2. If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total
depression.
Peter Drucker
#3. Total war uses every conceivable means toward the end of national self-preservation. Everything is right and permitted that serves the cause of one's own people.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#4. War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
Salman Rushdie
#5. Our vision of war is probably too influenced by the biggest one of all, World War II, where the forces of evil were so unambiguous and so relentless that there was no choice but to commit to total war and to demand unconditional surrender. Seldom, though, is it quite that clear cut.
David Horsey
#6. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.
John Hersey
#7. The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy.
William Manchester
#8. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
Richard Perle
#9. The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.
Lester B. Pearson
#10. No one will deny that the excessive use of alcohol and alcoholic beverages would do more than any other single factor to make impossible a total war effort.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
#11. It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.
Ron Paul
#12. No war can end war except a total war which leaves no human creature on earth. Each war creates the causes of war: hate, desire for revenge and have-nots, desperate with need.
Zelda Popkin
#13. Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total ... because it may well involve the whole world.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#14. Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?
Joseph Goebbels
#15. Very few people chose war. They chose selfishness and the result was war. Each of us, individually and nationally, must choose: total love or total war.
David Dellinger
#16. We have failed to see that total peace can be as deadly as total war.
Kevin J. Anderson
#17. Arabs and their allies are conducting a total war against Israel. A total war means a war of lies. The PA [Palestinian Authority] promotes lies; lying in Islam is permitted.
Manfred Gerstenfeld
#18. If the military might of Germany and Japan are ultimately to be crushed, the United Nations, one and all, must definitely and urgently strive toward a total war effort.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
#19. Aggressors cannot wage total war without introducing Socialism.
Ludwig Von Mises
#20. Total war is the most humane in the long run.
C.S. Lewis
#21. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
Gordon Brown
#22. Pardon one offence, and you encourage the commission of many.
Publilius Syrus
#23. We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be detested in France.
Duke Of Wellington
#24. The only answer to a regime that wages total cold war is to wage total peace.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#25. Total victory is the only acceptable goal in a mind-control war because humanity is diminished so long as a single mind remains trapped in superstition [supernatural religion] by programming or choice.
Howard Thompson
#26. It is imperative to contest all factions for complete victory, so the army is not garrisoned and the profit can be total. This is the law of strategic siege.
Sun Tzu
#27. (On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda
Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.
Jared Diamond
#28. The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels.
Ren Ng
#29. We have to go massively, like we did in the first Gulf War where we destroyed Saddam's ability to take Kuwait. We need to have a coalition that will stand for nothing less than the total destruction of ISIS and we have to be the leader.
John Kasich
#30. He must be able to mystify his officers and men by false reports and appearances, and thus keep them in total ignorance.
Sun Tzu
#31. For me personally and for most other Americans, this commitment to peace and diplomacy does not imply a blind or total pacifism. There are times when war is justified, and for many centuries the moral criteria for violence have been carefully delineated.
Jimmy Carter
#33. During World War II, Iceland was a poor country with a total population of about 120,000 people. In contrast, the occupying U.S. force consisted of roughly 40,000 men - which meant that U.S. soldiers outnumbered adult Icelandic men - at least during the height of the occupation.
Gudjon Bergmann
#35. We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong ... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them.
Alexander Bickel
#37. All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.
Laurie Lee
#39. Actual combat experience is the only teacher. You never come out of a skirmish without having picked up a couple of new tricks; without having learned more about your enemy ... Total involvement with the war was the only thing that kept me alive and pushing.
Audie Murphy
#40. We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
Michael Herr
#41. The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED.
Alex E. Jones
#42. The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.
Noam Chomsky
#43. U.S. history that while the nation fought its greatest war against the world's worst racist, it maintained a segregated army abroad and a total system of discrimination at home.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#44. War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion.
Rene Girard
#45. Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, "them" and "us," victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.
Robert Fisk
#46. Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn't take long for it to rise again as a much more malignant threat. The end of World War II was not to be a compromise; it was to come about from the total annihilation of the enemies' ability and will to make war.
Monica Crowley
#47. International war is the sum total of millions of individual wars, raging in the minds of the people, between what is selfish and what is selfless. To the extent that you and I develop selflessness in our own hearts, to that extent we contribute to peace in our family, community, country, and world.
Eknath Easwaran
#48. Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims.
Michael Herr
#49. War is the only proper school of the surgeon.
Hippocrates
#50. It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.
Dan Simmons
#51. In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
Marquis De Sade
#52. The entire stock of relationships which suited in war - militiae - was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace - domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
#53. What, do they run already? Then I die happy.
James Wolfe
#54. In this war, which was total in every sense of the word, we have seen many great changes in military science. It seems to me that not the least of these was the development of psychological warfare as a specific and effective weapon.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#56. Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.
Edmund Burke
#57. 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
#58. You know, God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject.
Nancy Pelosi
#59. Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.
Sun Tzu
#60. AIDS today in Africa is claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famines and floods and the ravages of such deadly diseases as malaria ... We must act now for the sake of the world.
Nelson Mandela
#61. The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.
Henry Kissinger
#62. By 1989, the total number of Vietnam veterans who had died in violent accidents or by suicide after the war exceeded the total number of American soldiers who died during the war.
Vladislav Tamarov
#63. It was something he had never quite understood about himself. He had seen thousands of men die in nearly ten years of war and could look on it at times with a near-total detachment, but an animal suffering - be it a horse or needra injured in battle, or the stag now dying - moved him deeply.
Raymond E. Feist
#64. The certain way to victory ... lies in making everything on Imperial soil contribute to the war effort ... combining the total material and spiritual strength of the nation ...
Yoshijiro Umezu
#66. You must think I'm a total idiot."
"Nah. I am starting to wonder if you're trying to beat Keefe's record for biggest interspeciesial episode- and if you are, I'm pretty sure you've won. The Great Gulon Incident was epic, but it didn't almost start a war.
Shannon Messenger
#67. Keep in mind that the Iraqis are not telling us anything we don't already know or can't prove. This is what makes this whole inspection process and all the rigmarole surrounding it a total farce.
Rush Limbaugh
#68. Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.
Daniel Berrigan
#69. President Reagan fueled the spirit of America. His smile, his optimism, his total belief in the ultimate triumph of democracy and freedom, and his willingness to act on that belief, helped end the Cold War and usher in a new and brighter phase of history.
Colin Powell
#70. Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much!
Aristophanes
#71. When Bush first got elected, the very first time there was talk of going to war with Iraq, the mainstream media gave his position total credibility. I didn't get it then, and I don't get it now.
Ed Harris
#72. Through cruelty force confesses its powerlessness to achieve omnipotence . . . We see weakness dawning at the very height of force. Unable to admit that total destruction is impossible, the conqueror can only reply to the mute defiance of his defenseless adversary with an ever-growing violence.
Rachel Bespaloff
#73. No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.
Henry Miller
#74. Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term.
Bob Barr
#75. Had Howe pressed on the afternoon of the 27th, the British victory could have been total. Or had the wind turned earlier, and the British navy moved into the East River, the war and the chances of an independent United States of America could have been long delayed, or even ended there and then.
David McCullough
#76. Can we render ourselves extinct? Possibly. Perhaps total nuclear war, 1980s style, would do it, although even a horrible nuclear winter might simply mean that New Zealanders inherit the globe.
Frank Landis
#77. We need a total renunciation of war. We must renounce war totally, because now we can destroy all life on earth.
Benjamin Creme
#78. War and peace type products ... cannot be added into a national product total until the differences in the valuation due to differences in the institutional mechanisms that determine their respective market prices are corrected for.
Simon Kuznets
