Small War Quotes

#1. Secretary [John] Kerry has called Civil War [in Syria] an unbelievably small war that we're going to get involved with.

Rand Paul

#2. Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#3. Walk softly and carry a big stick. Or stomp loudly and carry enough firepower to start a small war. Whatever worked

Faith Hunter

#4. Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heel of small
war
until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime

Robert Lowell

#5. War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves.

Rosanne Cash

#6. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world.

Bertrand Russell

#7. This is how worship is connected to our ability to love. When we give our ultimate allegiance to any of the principalities and powers, large or small, we find ourselves perennially at war with anyone who places these things at risk. Idolatry breeds perpetual vigilance and violence.

Richard Beck

#8. I took my orders, too. But if i couldn't keep you alive, I thought I could at least keep you together. In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.

Mitch Albom

#9. Nations like the Cuban and the Swiss
Can never hope to wage a Global Mission.
No Holy Wars for them. The most the small
Can ever give us is a nuisance brawl.

Robert Frost

#10. His men had begun gathering the wounded or stunned into a small group some distance back up the slope. Here and there an animal or human stirred, but not many. There were few cries of pain or fear now. Mostly, it was eerily quiet. Even the insects had ceased their music.

Derek Donais

#11. World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire

Nelly Sachs

#12. He also had his proof that bureaucracy made small problems into big problems. India convinced Dad that Britain, which he called socialist England, had delayed the Allied victory in World War II by an entire year.

Claire Conner

#13. Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.

Vita Sackville-West

#14. I just want to stop the cycle of killing," Freddy said. "It isn't necessary. It isn't even necessary that people eat meat. And it certainly isn't necessary that people make war on people. I'm doing my small part to change the species." "Umm," said Howard.

Ernest Hebert

#15. Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

Plato

#16. So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war.

Nevil Shute

#17. If equally matched, we can offer battle; if slightly inferior in numbers, we can avoid the enemy; if quite unequal in every way, we can flee from him. Though an obstinate fight may be made by a small force, in the end it must be captured by the larger force.

Sun Tzu

#18. It is my ambition as a Dichter to maintain, for a small number of people who may happen to understand me and be accessible to my influence, a transcendent life, or at least the desire for it, in the midst of the money-and-war-culture which the world has become.

Hermann Hesse

#19. That paper
it sits there, open at the employment section. It sits there like a war, and each small advertisement is another trench for a person to dive into. To hope and fight in.

Markus Zusak

#20. Part of me always wanted to do something useful for the world. It came from my mother. She is a paediatrician and she was active in a small NGO for the child victims of war.

Esther Duflo

#21. Such a small question, little mouse. Why. Yet, such a large answer. Suffice it to say that the gods are at war. And when the gods make war, it's we little mice who pay the price."

~Dal Durvaas, The Living Gods

W.M. Driscoll

#22. Fighting with a large army under your command is nowise different from fighting with a small one: it is merely a question of instituting signs and signals.

Sun Tzu

#23. In terms of any sacrifices at the time [of World War II], I was somewhat protected living on a small farm where there was food, different perhaps from living in a city environment. I know such things as gas rationing did exist, but it wasn't anything that interfered with my daily activity.

Paul Smith

#24. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. The strategist makes small things into big things, like building a great Buddha from a one foot model.

Miyamoto Musashi

#25. Syria may appear to be a small country, but it is just the type of entangled conflict that can lead to a world catastrophe. It does not take much imagination to see Syria as the Sarajevo of the 21st century, leading to world war.

Ahmed Zewail

#26. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the biggest problem, but small problems shape the daily lives of Israelis. Unless there happens to be a war going on, the Arab-Israeli conflict is irrelevant in daily life.

Yair Lapid

#27. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.

G.K. Chesterton

#28. People blame the 1960s for just about everything these days, but it was the decade when all that post-war furtiveness and small-mindedness was finally blown open, and opportunity really came knocking.

Pattie Boyd

#29. Sometimes you're just too close to something to see it clearly. To see it for what it really is. It's like you've got your face pressed to it, and all you can see is the small points. The things you want to see.

Scott Snyder

#30. It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end ... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.

Henry Adams

#31. It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.

T.H. White

#32. The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We're fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn't even get to America.

Lupe Fiasco

#33. We should've been different breeds. There can only be one lion in a small cage. It's not important if the other lion is sleeping or crouching in the corner. The only important thing is that ... it's a lion.

Seyoung Kim

#34. In times of war or peace the US will gladly pay a man to fail should his heart be in it, a small shimmering proof of the American dream.

Jonathan Culver

#35. We are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed in defiance of international good faith at the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.

H. H. Asquith

#36. The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.

Bob Schieffer

#37. The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war's consequences.

E.B. White

#38. Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.

Max Lerner

#39. The frailty of the world was no longer just a thought in the back of everyone's mind, it had pillaged its way to the forefront. The ides of war ebbed the small rough stones of hope from shore and vomited back terror, smooth and refined.

Michael Polaski

#40. The war drops its question mark. Memos are distributed. The collections must be protected. A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates. Locks and keys are in greater demand than ever.

Anthony Doerr

#41. Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.

Geraldine Brooks

#42. My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

Charles Bukowski

#43. Drug-war forfeiture laws are frequently used to allow those with assets to buy their freedom, while drug users and small-time dealers with few assets to trade are subjected to lengthy prison terms.

Michelle Alexander

#44. [The chief lesson of this chapter, in Tu Mu's opinion, is the paramount importance in war of rapid evolutions and sudden rushes. "Great results," he adds, "can thus be achieved with small forces."]

Sun Tzu

#45. I started natural farming after the war with just one small plot, but gradually I acquired additional acreage by taking over surrounding pieces of abandoned land and caring for them by hand.

Masanobu Fukuoka

#46. Until the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, until then Israel didn't have a chance but to fight for her life. We were attacked five times, outgunned, outnumbered, on a small piece of land, and our main challenge was to remain alive.

Shimon Peres

#47. The greatest experience I've ever had in a movie theater was watching "Star Wars." It shaped how I look at the world. My imagination was so small before I went in that theater and there was an explosion in my head. I just couldn't figure out how someone came up with it.

Will Smith

#48. This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States.

Isabel Allende

#49. I know something about that war, and I never want to see that history repeated. But, my fellow Americans, it certainly can be repeated if the peace-loving democratic nations again fearfully practice a policy of standing idly by while big aggressors use armed force to conquer the small and weak.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#50. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world.

G.K. Chesterton

#51. I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.

Nina Bawden

#52. 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

#53. It took the Gulf War to demonstrate that America did want more than one friend in the Mideast, and also was willing to take and make major risks to prevent a small Muslim country, Kuwait, from being overrun and in effect stolen by Iraq.

Caspar Weinberger

#54. Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name.

George Carlin

#55. As the world stood on the brink of war in August 1914, the local paper of a small town in the west of Ireland took a stand: 'We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you.

Robert Hutton

#56. Sri Lanka is a small island, and the war affected everybody. Everybody knew somebody who was killing or being killed.

Ru Freeman

#57. Freedom has more often been lost in small steps by progressive incrementalism, than it has been by catastrophic upheavals such as violence or war.

James Madison

#58. Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#59. War is a lottery in which nations ought to risk nothing but small amounts.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#60. The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

David M. Friedman

#61. I believed, with morbid sincerity, that if I could make him my friend, we would together, in some small but consequential way, defy the wicked logic of hate and war, that we, together, would stand as a rebuke to the grotesque idea that our problem was without a solution.

Jeffrey Goldberg

#62. A lizard, resting in the shade of the anthill, studied Atkinson with interest, tilting its head this way and that. Atkinson studied it in return. A small, dull brown animal, usually it would not catch Atkinson's attention, but under the circumstances it became a thing of beauty.

Martin Marais

#63. The strength of God will enable us, a small but faithful band, to overcome the multitude of the faithless.

Robert Guiscard

#64. When they came into their trench he felt small enough. The biggest thing there was the roaring of Death and the smallest thing was a man. Bombs not so far off distressed the earth of Belgium, disgorged great heaps of it, and did everything except kill him immediately, as he half expected them to do.

Sebastian Barry

#65. So many people chased after me in that time, calling my name, asking me to take them with me. Then there was the small percentage who called me casually over and whispered with their tightend voices.

Markus Zusak

#66. We like it the way it is. We're enjoying the oscillating balances, the ongoing war between good and evil, the wonderful small triumphs of the soul. Perhaps it's too soon to end all that. Perhaps we need some more time to think things out.

Mark Helprin

#67. War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace time.

John Hay Beith

#68. However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account.

Neville Chamberlain

#69. The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

Brendan Behan

#70. With a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war, the US and Australia could ensure every starving, sunken-eyed child on the planet could be well fed, have clean water and sanitation and a local school to go to.

Bob Brown

#71. Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some small sacrifice in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war-time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.

Richard Dawkins

#72. 1. The desperate Jews - their spirits in my lap as we sat on the roof, next to the steaming chimneys.
2. The Russian soldiers - taking only small amounts of ammunition, relying on the fallen for the rest of it.
3. The soaked bodies of a French coast - beached on the shingle and sand.

Markus Zusak

#73. I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.

W.G. Sebald

#74. The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

George Orwell

#75. If your courage holds in the small battles, it will hold in the great ones.

Cliff Graham

#76. They give an "X" rating to flicks
Where sex is the center of kicks,
While violence and war
Are considered fit for
Small children no older than six.

Norman W. Storer

#77. suppose, if you had to call it something, you could say that that was our civil war. It was too big a thing, too tied up in moral certainties to be called a mutiny, too small and ultimately futile to be called a revolution.

Frank Tayell

#78. for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that was considered deeply corrupt during the Watergate days. The

Jane Mayer

#79. Wars of small kingdoms and forgotten lands, what do chessmen dream of in the dark?

Keri Hulme

#80. As we have seen, the wireless and the airplane have made the world so small and nations so dependent on each other that the only alternative to war is the United States of the World.

John Boyd Orr

#81. A single three-bladed fan turned slowly in the centre of the ceiling, barely disturbing the scorching air which filled the small prefabricated hut like an oven...

Kevin Cowdall

#82. Logan had infiltrated enemy strongholds with less effort than he was expending to get this family tell him the complete truth ... Something was very wrong when war seemed so much simpler than his home life.

Cat Johnson

#83. I was born and brought up near a village in Nottinghamshire and in my childhood enjoyed the freedom of the rather isolated country life. After the First World War, my father had bought a small farm, which became a marvelous playground for his five children.

Godfrey Hounsfield

#84. Every war invariably results in terrible tragedies, immense waste and sinful destruction. All wars, no matter how big or small, how nearby or far away, diminish OUR humanity to a barbaric level.

Takayuki Ishii

#85. One man always makes a difference. Sometimes it's a small one. Other times, he tips a war.

Brian McClellan

#86. No amphibious attack in history has approached this one in size. Along miles of coastline there were hundreds of vessels and small boats afloat and ant-like files of advancing troops ashore.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#87. Games? War is not a game, my friend. Games are for small children and old men like me. War is a young man's blighted delight

Renee Ahdieh

#88. She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.

Kate Morton

#89. People have to realize that dieting is not a sprint, it's a marathon. If you celebrate the small victories, you will eventually win the war.

Ian K. Smith

#90. Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of - hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate.

Mary Ann Shaffer

#91. As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.

Henry David Thoreau

#92. One small boy was all it took to upset the universe

James Miller

#93. A speck of ire can
blaze a fire; the fate of war can
be sealed with a dart,
a butterfly flapping its wings
may turn the tide miles apart!

Somali K Chakrabarti

#94. War is very sad and small life is pathetically fragile at times.

Henry Rollins

#95. If we take a small step in extolling peacemakers as much as honoring war heroes, we will be making a giant leap towards peace.

Newton Lee

#96. We should demand that (Customs and Border Protection) focus on the true priority that we face on the war on terror ... Stripping small amounts of prescription drugs from the hands of seniors ... that should not be a priority.

David Vitter

#97. His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violence.

James S.A. Corey

#98. The likely economic effects [of the war in Iraq] would be relatively small ... Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.

Lawrence B. Lindsey

#99. Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out.

John Owen Theobald

#100. In peacetime some sort of introduction is generally required to make a person's acquaintance; in war a small eatable will perform the same office.

Susanna Clarke