Top 100 Quotes About War And Politics
#1. We can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.
Walter Lippmann
#2. We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.
Ray Bradbury
#3. Everything is fair and possible in love, war, and politics.
Chandana Roy
#4. Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
Jonathan Haidt
#5. I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things.
John Adams
#6. Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.
Romesh Gunesekera
#7. There is a feminist proverb I learned from my mother: The personal is political. There's a powerful literary stereotype that men write about war and politics and public life, while women confine themselves to family and food and personal life.
Annia Ciezadlo
#8. And she never had, Doug mused, because war and politics go for the big view and trample all over the little guy. France during the Revolution or a steamy pit of a jungle in Nam. It never changed. He knew just what it felt like to be helpless. He wasn't going to feel that way ever again.
Nora Roberts
#9. When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.
Herbert Hoover
#10. The borders of man, defined by politics, war, and faith - all three manifestations of delusion - meant even more to gods.
Michael R. Fletcher
#11. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and
Will Durant
#12. Daddy, I don't like military parades. I never want to be like those people who march rank and file to music - they were given brains by mistake.
Corinne Maier
#13. In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.
George Clooney
#14. Well, politics is war, and in war, truth is the first casualty.
Jeff Greenfield
#15. Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.
Vladimir Lenin
#16. Rather than comparing [war] to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#17. 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
#18. War, like politics, was men's work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women's loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself,
Karen Abbott
#19. History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation's spirit can be achieved.
Aysha Taryam
#20. The politics of the exile are fever,
revenge, daydream,
theater of the aging convalescent.
You wait in the wings and rehearse.
You wait and wait.
Marge Piercy
#21. I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.
David Talbot
#22. There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.
Warren Buffett
#23. Acharya, is war the only solution to political differences?' 'Wise pupil, politics is war without bloodshed and war is simply politics with bloodshed.
Ashwin Sanghi
#24. I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's 'policy' is benevolent, can you now?
John Le Carre
#25. War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.
Phil Klay
#26. All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.
Mark Twain
#27. In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war.
Arthur Henderson
#28. I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public places. (And the bed and the bar are, in their way, as public as the floor of Congress.)
Tim O'Brien
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. At the time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics.
Asghar Farhadi
#32. If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
Virginia Woolf
#33. Those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection.
Donald Rumsfeld
#34. What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi
#35. There are many different ways of categorizing news. It doesn't have to be just war and famine and serious politics.
Piers Morgan
#36. Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions - political, economic,
psychological, military - that aims at the overthrow of the established
authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.
Roger Trinquier
#37. It's when the 'international community' expresses 'concern' about your 'situation' that your situation is well and truly fucked.
Michael D. Weiss
#38. War is a difficult time for everybody - for soldiers on the front and for the people on the road. War takes away from us everything that we know, as we know it. It gives us a blank slate to re-write our lives and for ink it gives us blood.
Preeti Bhonsle
#39. Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.
Newt Gingrich
#40. 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
#41. You won't hear me talk about my politics, you won't hear me talk about my vegetarianism, you won't hear me comment on the Iraq war. You'll only hear me talk about being gay and being an actor. I am just public on those two issues.
Ian McKellen
#42. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.
Alice McDermott
#43. I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.
John Quincy Adams
#44. A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.
Glenn Greenwald
#45. For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.
John Le Carre
#46. Is it more important for you to know what happened in the First World War or to memorize other significant dates in history, or is it more important to learn the strategies they used for optimum leadership, success and joyful living?
Don't you think schools need to teach the latter?
Maddy Malhotra
#47. I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
Winston Churchill
#48. The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.
Roger Scruton
#49. As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded, giving full reign to the fickle fortunes of war.
Charles Emmerson
#50. Before now poetry has taken notice
Of wars, and what are wars but politics
Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?
Robert Frost
#51. They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better the could argue.
Richard Wright
#52. Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.
Tariq Ali
#53. In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.
Simon Schama
#54. Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.
Edward Said
#55. Until all the files are released, former officials and CIA personnel will continue to say or imply that Fidel killed JFK, thus perpetuating the fifty-plus-year Cold War with Cuba
Lamar Waldron
#56. Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
Gore Vidal
#57. We understood that politics is nothing but war without bloodshed and war is nothing but politics with bloodshed.
Fred Hampton
#58. During the Cold War, the non-aligned movement tried to become a 'third force' in world politics, but failed because it was too large and unwieldy.
Stephen Kinzer
#59. Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)
Laura Mullen
#60. The United States is now harbouring Luis Posada Carriles. His continued freedom mocks victims of terrorism everywhere. It also shows how heavily the 'war on terror' is overlaid with politics and hypocrisy.
Stephen Kinzer
#61. 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
#62. Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened.
Rachel Klein
#64. but after WWII, politics began to impede American war fighting to the extent that victory is fleeting at best and unlikely at worst.
Billy Vaughn
#65. War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.
Elie Ducommun
#67. To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.
Tariq Ali
#68. Takin' it to ISIS, man!" Blue Jacket thumped his chest twice, and I read the saying on his shirt: Turning ISIS into WASWAS.
Jennifer Lane
#69. There is a very simple relationship between increased socioeconomic rifts in the society and increased violence, criminality, war, increased lack of trust between people, health problems and social exclusion - but it seems to be very difficult for people to understand this simple relationship.
Swami Dhyan Giten
#70. Tis useful nonetheless, now and then, to regard Politics here, as the greater American Question in Miniature, - in the way that Chess represents war, - with Governor Penn a game-piece in the form of the King.
Thomas Pynchon
#71. Nothing - not even the US Army - more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.
Marc Cooper
#72. If you ever get a war without blood and gore, well, I'll be the first to go.
Phil Ochs
#73. Deception, you see, lies at the heart of business, politics and war. Even pleasure, wouldn't you say? Everyone practises it, from the President of China to the whores on Lockhart Road.
Michael Wreford
#74. What war did for him (hasten disillusionment with communism), childbirth did for me. I began to notice what neglected, neurotic waifs the children of Communists were and to question the genuineness of the love of mankind that didn't begin at home.
Joy Davidman
#75. Mum has always been a huge anti-war activist. She would go off to protest and get arrested. I have her passion, but it is not for politics. I am much more interested in psychology. It's more my job and my natural inclination.
Joan Cusack
#76. We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.
Otto Von Bismarck
#77. We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#78. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing the "Nazi regime has ruined German industry." And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, "What a fool ( Dummkopf ) I was!
William L. Shirer
#79. Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics.
Pico Iyer
#80. Nowhere in this universe does evil exist except in the mind of mankind. only man can take an idea or symbol which is so simple and innocent, and then twist it and corrupt it until it is something to hate or kill one another over.
Andrew James Pritchard
#81. Just like all people - just want to get on with their lives, and have families, and have a bit of fun and have a decent life. They are not interested in war - no one is, unless you are a professional soldier. Or a politician! And then of course it's your living!
Gerald Scarfe
#82. We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.
John Green
#83. To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
George Santayana
#84. 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
#85. Politics is beginning to gather itself into an election season in which the price of a candidate's haircuts will be as important for a time as his position on war. The country is entertained, but not engaged. It is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge.
Charles P. Pierce
#86. Yes, politics IS war without bloodshed; and war is an extension of those politics.
H. Rap Brown
#88. We should stop worrying so much about the price of gasoline and start considering its cost. You really want to be patriotic? Don't change your car by putting a flag on it, change the car.
Bill Maher
#89. I have learned from experience that, in the bluff and counterbluff of world politics, to draw a hostile war lord as a horrible monster is to play his game. What he doesn't like is being shown as a silly ass.
David Low
#90. War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.
Colin Powell
#91. I wanted people to know that we fired rounds into moving trucks and open windows to survive, not for anyone else's freedom. Not for the Democrats. Not for Republicans. Just to survive.
Clint Van Winkle
#92. You don't stockpile guns because 'you never know'. You stockpile guns because you do know. And while you may be wrong, your shitload of guns says you no longer welcome debate on the subject.
Eric Sennevoight
#93. Millions of mind guerrillas, raising the spirit of peace and love, not war.
John Lennon
#94. We've finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don't want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States.
Ann Coulter
#95. And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way.
Barack Obama
#96. People whose lives were determined for them by a group of politicians whose severing, dissecting and reattaching of their lands has turned their world into a monster that not even its creator can control.
Aysha Taryam
#97. Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.
Nancy Gibbs
#98. Whoever has an army has power, and war decides everything.
Mao Zedong
#99. McChrystal had organized a jaw-dropping counterterrorism campaign inside Iraq, but the tactical successes did not translate into a strategic victory. This was why counterinsurgency - blanketing the population in safety and winning them over - was necessary.
Bob Woodward
#100. I hadn't had a chance to read an entire novel in weeks.
Whatever the others might say about politics, civil war, and hunters, the real evil was lack of reading time. If they all read more they might freak out less. And if I was going to live forever I was going to have to start a reading list.
Alyxandra Harvey
