Reason For War Quotes

#1. If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another ... after the war is on.

Robert M. La Follette

#2. My dad always told me that the principal reason he chose New Zealand to emigrate to after World War II was the high regard his father had for the Kiwis he encountered at Gallipoli.

Peter Jackson

#3. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

Ernest Hemingway,

#4. It is inconceivable that even the gang who runs Russia would be willing to take on war, but one always has to remember that there seemed to be no reason in 1939 for Hitler to start war, and yet he did, and he started it with a world practically unprepared.

James Forrestal

#5. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

Daniel Levitin

#6. It would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war.

Hermann Hesse

#7. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way - the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason - and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble.

Gregory David Roberts

#8. As long as we have all these conflicts, it is the women who will continue to suffer, so that is one reason why I guess as women we should really work for peace, because we know how painful wars can be to us and our daughters.

Wangari Maathai

#9. The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba'athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.

Lawrence Anthony

#10. Los Padres have everything and the people have nothing; 'tis the masterpiece of reason and justice. For my part, I know nothing so divine as Los Padres who make war on Kings of Spain and Portugal and in Europe act as their confessors; who here kill Spaniards and at Madrid send them to Heaven.

Voltaire

#11. There is no reason for him to be in a strange land, the grim reaper holding him close, saying, "Yes, today is the day," or "No, not yet.

Suzanne Hayes

#12. And surely, surely, if we are not simply animals that live to fight, there must be a reason for bloodshed.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#13. Do they think if we destroy our freedoms for the terrorists they will no longer have a reason to attack us?

Ron Paul

#14. And finally, and most importantly, the next time we go to war, don't give a specific reason for the war that the left can seize upon and later flog us with it ad nauseam, just do it. Remember, the first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club.

Dennis Miller

#15. 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

#16. Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament-but only in enemy countries, not in his own.

Hermann Hesse

#17. Men's willingness to die for his country, is the reason he has to.

Anonymous

#18. I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled.

Howard Zinn

#19. For some reason, lots of terrible things start here and then spread. The Cold War was one. It didn't start in Berlin - it started in Athens in December 1944; the contagion in the eurozone started here in 2010. We are perfectly capable as Europeans of messing things up unnecessarily.

Yanis Varoufakis

#20. They fight a war and they don't know what for. Isn't that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different color uniform and speaks a different language?

Michael Morpurgo

#21. When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force.

Ayn Rand

#22. I believe that it is possible for one to praise, without concern, any man after he is dead since every reason and supervision for adulation is lacking.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#23. Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting, and one who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others, whereas causes for taking life are rarer and more quickly destroyed.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#24. We need to learn ... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.

Tony Judt

#25. Americans ... have wrought a country that has after more than two centuries yet to evidence a single year during which it was not making war upon someone, somewhere, for some reason.

Ward Churchill

#26. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.

Otto Dix

#27. Putting aside all the fancy words and academic doubletalk, the basic reason for having a military is to do two jobs -to kill people and to destroy.

Thomas S. Power

#28. I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.

Will Rogers

#29. The fights I fought ... cost a lot
the fight for the assault-weapons ban cost 20 members their seats in Congress. The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.

William J. Clinton

#30. If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.
[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.]

Ernest Rutherford

#31. The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.

Chris Hedges

#32. 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,

#33. I can't find a reason to be for this war. I've looked, and I can't, so I'm not.

Chris Matthews

#34. If it has to be that wars and battles are begun for many reasons and quarrels, then they should also be avoided and shunned by better and more valid reasons ...

Christine De Pizan

#35. No matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money.

Margaret Mitchell

#36. I just want people to see what I deem as a war for no reason, but only for greed.

Robert Cray

#37. If you are not a Conchie, what are you man?' demanded the Major.
After some moments' thought, Francis said, 'I am a human being who does not believe in killing my fellow man for insufficient reason.

Theresa Breslin

#38. I personally hold Blair more responsible for this war than I do George Bush. The reason is, Blair knows better, Blair is not an idiot. What is he doing hanging around this guy?

Michael Moore

#39. What happened in World War II was what happened in war generally, and that was whatever the initiating cause, and however clear the moral reason is for the war in which one side looks better than the other, by the time the war ends both sides have been engaged in evil.

Howard Zinn

#40. It is on this beautiful day that we celebrate the Fuhrers birthday and thank him for he is the only reason why Germany is still alive today

Joseph Goebbels

#41. It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#42. The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.

Jerome Lawrence

#43. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we're afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.

Seth Godin

#44. I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory.

Adolf Hitler

#45. Every thoughtful, well-meaning and conscientious human being
should assume in time of peace,
the solemn and unconditional obligation
not to participate in any war, for any reason
or to lend support of any kind, whether direct or indirect.

Albert Einstein

#46. The success of our surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will prove to be the Waterloo of the war to follow. For this reason the Imperial Navy is massing the cream of its strength in ships and planes to assure success.

Chuichi Nagumo

#47. The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

Sloane Crosley

#48. 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

#49. Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.

Albert Camus

#50. To us, too, the machine is something external, something we that we have set up outside ourselves. But it is our indispensable resource, whether in peace or war; and for that reason we endorse it and accept it.

Ernst Junger

#51. What was the reason for invading Iraq' Was it a humanitarian crusade or an economic one' I would be inclined to say the latter. It was the same with the Civil War, because the landed gentry's money was being stolen by the king.

Dougray Scott

#52. The cries of the wounded had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes.

Edwin Campion Vaughan

#53. If we pursue our habit of eating animals, and if our neighbour follows a similar path, will we need to go to war against our neighbour to secure greater pasturage, because ours will not be enough to sustain us, and our neighbour will have a similar need to wage war on us for the same reason.

Socrates

#54. Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Norman Mailer

#55. Cigarettes are called coffin nails for a reason, Billy Boy," I remembered telling him. "Be careful with those things. You're risking your life.

Cat Winters

#56. Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

William Faulkner

#57. The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.

P. J. O'Rourke

#58. The progressive movement against the war of occupation in Iraq is a reason for hope, as is resistance to free trade agreements in Latin America. Those are moments that we have to celebrate: that people still find the resolve and energy to resist.

Danny Glover

#59. One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn't finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason.

Katherine Paterson

#60. I won't make games with senseless violence. There has to be a reason for it, such as war.

Hideo Kojima

#61. The only reason Henry's like he is now is because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the war came along and paid for his education. Fine a boy as he is, the trash won't wash out of him.

Harper Lee

#62. One must apply one's reason to everything here, learning to obey, to shut up, to help, to be good, to give in, and I don't know what else. I'm afraid I shall use up all my brains too quickly, and I haven't got so very many. Then I shall not have any left for when the war is over.

Anne Frank

#63. There are no unemployed, either in Russia or in Dartmoor jail, and for the same reason.

Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden

#64. If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.

William Graham Sumner

#65. Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

Plato

#66. We haven't been happy with the way the war has been handled. The president has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached.

Cindy Sheehan

#67. Whatever may be the reason, whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, orwhether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete
however, one thing is certain: he missed the bus.

Neville Chamberlain

#68. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#69. I want Cuba ... I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason for the planting and spreading of slavery.

Albert G. Brown

#70. If we had no hope - for a cure, for winning the lottery, for falling in love, for the end of war, for being free of abuse, or for having food, warmth, clothing, and shelter - we would have no reason to go on. What you hope for doesn't matter, but rather the essence of hope itself.

Bernie Siegel

#71. Since the end of the World War II, the United States has fought three "small" wars ... we lost all three of them and for the same reason-hubris.

Andrew Greeley

#72. No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.

A.J.P. Taylor

#73. Vietnam should remind conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder.

Karl Hess

#74. I think that war is diplomacy. There have been wars that have been fought for righteous reasons and there are wars that have had to be fought. Indeed, there will continue to be.

Stephen Lang

#75. Yes, I did have to struggle very hard to get this [the vote on the Iraq war] through, but the reason I did it was because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't take this on myself ... just because I thought, 'Let's give myself a really hard time for a couple of years!

Tony Blair

#76. The reason that so many times we don't win the battle is that we never show up for the war!

Adrian Rogers

#77. War is not glorious. War is hell. The only reason for fighting it is to
achieve some good end that cannot be achieved by any other means.

Carla Nayland

#78. Men and boys always want to go fight. They are always looking for a reason to go to war. It is the saddest thing. They have this abiding notion that war is fun. And no history lesson will convince them differently.

Kate DiCamillo

#79. To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason

H.L. Mencken

#80. War makes extremely heavy demands on the soldier's strength and nerves. For this reason, make heavy demands on your men in peacetime exercises.

Erwin Rommel

#81. 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

#82. I see no reason to use offensive tools unless you're defending the country or in a state of war, or you want to achieve some really important thing for the good of the nation and others.

Keith B. Alexander