Top 100 Real War Quotes
#1. Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
Arundhati Roy
#2. Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.
Nick Turse
#3. [ ... ] In real war an officer may have only one chance at succeeding. Consider each problem.
David Gemmell
#4. This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.
Maxine Waters
#5. Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war.
Eduardo Galeano
#6. If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
Mahatma Gandhi
#7. But it then very soon became clear that the response of a war against terrorism, initially conceived of in a metaphorical sense, began to be taken increasingly seriously and came to entail waging a real war.
Ulrich Beck
#8. To me it was real war and my life was at stake, and I believe that all those clandestine spy games we played as children helped when the Occupation came.
Diet Eman
#9. The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
Randall Jarrell
#10. Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.
Conrad Black
#11. This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
Reif Larsen
#12. They have called Operation Iraqi Freedom a war of choice that isn't part of the real war on terror. Someone should tell that to al Qaeda.
John Boehner
#13. His real war was within himself. He was a boy dressed as a soldier, pumping his chest, slinging his gun, and fleeing in horror at a glimpse of his own reflection.
Maggie Young
#14. There is no conscience in a real war.
Toba Beta
#15. This is not class warfare, this is generational warfare. This administration and old wealthy people have declared war on young people. That is the real war that is going on here. And that is the war we've got to talk about.
James Carville
#16. In many ways, the crumbling of the institution of marriage is the real 'war on women.' Marriage is the civilizing influence for men and for families.
Tim Huelskamp
#17. I will give you war; a real war, not a slaughter of women and children but a war lead by me, the Mother Confessor, a woman! War without quarter! - Kahlan Amnell, Mother Confessor
Terry Goodkind
#18. Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper ...
Carl Von Clausewitz
#19. I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE
AND TELL EVERYONE
ABOUT ...
THE REAL WAR ON WOMEN
ON YAZIDI GIRLS & WOMEN
Widad Akreyi
#20. The war against working people should be understood to be a real war ... . Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class ... . And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don't want anybody else to know about it.
Noam Chomsky
#21. War is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily Mail and enjoy it at the breakfast table. It goes splendidly with bacon and eggs. Real war is the final limit of damnable brutality, and that's all there is in it.
Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy
#22. The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.
Marjane Satrapi
#24. My interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.
Smedley Butler
#25. To threaten someone with a gun is the same as attacking them, If you had taken his gun, the real war would have started, and in all likelihood we would never have got out of that place alive,
Jose Saramago
#26. That for them, that war won't ever be over. I don't think any real war ever is - large, small, between countries, between people. Even the wars inside ourselves. Something always remains.
Nancy Jensen
#27. It becomes easy," Finbar said. "It's in the training; the ability to see your enemy as something other than a real man. He is a lesser breed, defined by his beliefs - you learn to do with him what you will, and bend him to your purpose.
Juliet Marillier
#28. That level of trade deficit throttles real growth in our country and continues the unfortunate path of selling out America. We are not winning the global trade war, we are losing it badly.
Marcy Kaptur
#29. Of course, it's wonderful to film any period piece - but especially 'Foyle's War' because the art direction is so imaginative and yet at the same time so real. You can open a drawer on set, and even though the camera never sees what's inside, it'll be filled with genuine 1940s documents.
Honeysuckle Weeks
#30. Finally, we come to the real thing, the thing that makes men men, the thing were born for, Todd. War.
Patrick Ness
#31. Armaments are necessary - or are maintained on the pretext of necessity - because of a real or an imagined danger of war.
Ludwig Quidde
#32. Real peace is not only the absence of war but the presence of God .
Osunsakin Adewale
#33. There are at present many Coloured men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and labourers, but real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets.
Frederick Douglass
#34. A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#35. War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#36. She put her hand over her heart. Oh boy. It hurts. It's a real pain. Right here.
Elizabeth Berg
#37. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James Baldwin
#38. The most valuable real estate for a man is the woman's mind.
Many bloody battles have been fought for her mind space!
Sanjai Velayudhan
#39. 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
Tim O'Brien
#40. Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.
Ann Druyan
#41. Then the war became a real problem and along with other shortages, they started to have paper problems.
Gil Kane
#42. Real Jews, in concord with some Muslims, continue their war against Zionists and against Israeli crimes. The oppressed people of Palestine living under occupation must feel that believers of all faiths support them.
Maurice Motamed
#43. I came into politics because of a real childhood concern about the Cold War. So to me the importance of the nuclear deterrent is actually really ingrained in me.
Andrea Leadsom
#44. 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
#45. When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end.
Orson Scott Card
#46. All I know, is that I feel extremely blessed to be on TV. It's a hard job, but real life is harder. Truth be told, playgrounds can be war zones.
Atticus Shaffer
#47. The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.
John T. Flynn
#48. In real life, couples bond and war over a million different things. The causes of divorce are like beautiful, unique snowflakes.
Howard Mittelmark
#49. If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.
Louis Lecoin
#50. I think that we see war as a virtual thing and we even get to believe that bombs fall on top of cardboard cutouts and stuff like that. They don't. They kill real people, real children, real mothers and millions of innocent people.
Shakira
#51. Back during the war, the sides were a lot clearer. Now that we're fighting other humans again as well, things get muddy real fast. Many soldiers who were fantastic against the Covenant have now balked at battling the Front or any of the other dozens of homegrown terrorist groups across our worlds.
Matt Forbeck
#52. ...I had an acute sense that the walls were closing in on "real" Christians... For the first time in my life, I felt like a persecuted minority.
J.D. Vance
#53. If war is the health of the state, despair is the health of religion. Until African workers and peasants find belief systems that provides them with real hope of happiness in the here and now, they will continue to grasp at religion's false hope of happiness in the hereafter.
Anonymous
#54. In our world photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.
Philip Gourevitch
#55. There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.
Timothy West
#56. I have, throughout my private war, been a she, a you,a Donna, a me, and finally, an I ... If you sense distance,you're not mistaken; it's real. Welcome to my world.
Donna Williams
#57. So why don't they face us ... examine our evidence, debate, talk ... act like real historians instead of thought-police? Why shut us out of the media, pass laws against our speaking, persecute us, sue us, and vilify us?
Randolph D. Calverhall
#58. I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans ... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
Norman Mailer
#59. 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
#60. The present danger which this country faces is at least as great as the danger which we faced during the war with Germany and Japan. Briefly stated, it is the very real danger that this country, as we know it, may cease to exist.
James Forrestal
#61. It's a class war, and a war on young people too ... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.
Noam Chomsky
#62. It's angering that not everybody has signed this treaty to ban landmines. It's disgusting, it really is, because it is fact that (mines) hurt a high percentage of civilians. They're not effective in any other real way. They've enough weapons for war.
Angelina Jolie
#63. 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
#64. Jamie didn't talk to me about the war. Most men don't, who've seen real combat. It's the ones who spent their tours well behind the lines who want to tell you all about it, and the ones who never served who want to know.
Hillary Jordan
#65. Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.
Michael Ignatieff
#66. Every day there is a war inside your mind: A war between you and yourself! One side of you may defeat the other side of you! But you must know that your winning side might fail in the real world! Always be ready to give a chance immediately to your losing side, to your defeated idea!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#67. The real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt, and redemption. That,
David Graeber
#68. The war on apathy moved much slower than real wars fought on the ground.
Orson Scott Card
#69. The war years were the most difficult time of my life. There was real famine in Moscow. The water froze inside the houses. There was no heat.
Mstislav Rostropovich
#70. Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.
Michael Ignatieff
#71. When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first ... Of course, to observe is not its real duty, we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed ... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious.
Alan Turing
#72. War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
Gertrude Stein
#73. After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.
Alex Scarrow
#74. Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
George Orwell
#75. There's a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?
Jon Voight
#76. Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism's successor, for forty-five years after the war ended.
Anna Funder
#77. The only real diplomacy ever performed by a diplomat is in deceiving their own people after their dumbness has got them into a war.
Will Rogers
#78. The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.
Edgar Allan Poe
#79. The real lesson of 9/11 that I think we have still to learn is that this is a world of interdependence, in which all of the challenges of environment and climate change, of jobs, of disease, of war and terrorism, are cross-border problems that cannot be met one nation at a time.
Benjamin Barber
#80. We thought we'd seen it all. The real horror of war is always waiting for you at home. It's waiting, I tell you. We were so damned happy when we got back. We'd made it. We survived. But it's always waiting. Waiting. You let down your guard. And there it is. You can't ever let up. Give up.
James Anderson
#81. He says we need to live in the real world, where war and death are a reality, not pretend.
Pittacus Lore
#82. We are within measurable, or imaginable, distance of a real Armageddon. Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.
H. H. Asquith
#83. Have you taken the decision of war? Then, you are sick! Have you participated the war? Then, you are sick! Do you produce guns? Then, you are sick! Refuse all of them and be healthy, be human, be normal, be a real man!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#84. How ironic is it to see a bumper sticker that says 'Jesus is the answer' next to a bumper sticker supporting the war in Iraq, as if to says 'Jesus is the answer - but not in the real world.
Shane Claiborne
#85. One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
Thomas Sowell
#86. It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one's judgement.
Sara Sheridan
#87. Don't you want to know what's real and what's not? I remember when I was a kid, you know, this whole Cold War thing. They had us scared of the Russians. So, it's almost like, what's real and what's not?
Queen Latifah
#88. When a war is waged by two opposing groups of robbers for the sake of deciding who shall have a freer hand to oppress more people, then the question of the origin of the war is of no real economic or political significance.
Vladimir Lenin
#89. 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
#90. The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power.
Michael Mandelbaum
#91. He was a real-life soldier playing soldier from his memories of made up soldiers.
Alex London
#92. It's a real job" I said. "Getting promoted to martyrdom is not the top position.
Sam Wazan
#93. I was fascinated by the culture clash between England and America in the 1950s. My first memories are of being a girl in those post-war years when things were really pretty grim. It wasn't like that in America, which was real boom time.
Laurie Graham
#94. Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was "This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy." That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.
Joan Didion
#95. A real tank now costs about a million dollars, while a hallucinated one amounts to less than one-hundredth of a cent per person, or centispecter per spectator. A destroyer costs a dime. Today you could fit the whole arsenal of the United States inside a single truck.
Stanislaw Lem
#96. We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by.
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 2
Erich Maria Remarque
#97. There will never be a nuclear war; there's too much real estate involved.
Frank Zappa
#98. You can watch a little bit of war from your nice living room - 30 seconds of what's going on in Syria - and when you've had enough, switch over to some celebrity programme. We live our life through screens and images in this way, and we don't know what is real or fake anymore. It doesn't matter.
Alison Jackson
#99. Chuckled, referring to the time Markel had used up sixty percent of the system's resources to simulate a series of space battles in real time for one of his war games. Markel flushed.
Anne McCaffrey
#100. The spirituality of wonder knows the world is charged with grace, that while sin and war, disease and death are terribly real, God's loving presence and power in our midst are even more real.
Brennan Manning
