Top 100 State Of War Quotes
#1. In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War.
Alexander Hamilton
#2. American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.
Camille Paglia
#3. Hungary is, in a word, in a state of WAR against the Hapsburg dynasty, a war of legitimate defence, by which alone it can ever regain independence and freedom.
Lajos Kossuth
#4. Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.
John Locke
#5. Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#6. Each particular society begins to feel its strength, whence arises a state of war between different nations.
Charles De Secondat
#7. Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared.
Virginia Woolf
#8. When we seek reconciliation with our enemies, it is commonly out of a desire to better our own condition, a being harassed and tired out with a state of war, and a fear of some ill accident which we are willing to prevent.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#9. Don't forget we are in a state of war and no peace. But it's very dynamic and challenging compared to the rest of the Arab world.
Walid Jumblatt
#10. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated, even a state of war is not a blank check for a president to do whatever he wants.
Edward Kennedy
#11. A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.
Sandra Day O'Connor
#13. 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
#14. Does he [the president] possess the power of making war? That power is exclusively vested in Congress ... It is the exclusive province of Congress to change a state of peace into a state of war.
William Paterson
#15. Freedom cannot be trifled with. You cannot surrender it for security unless in a state of war, and then you must guard carefully the methods of so doing.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
#16. The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.
John Podhoretz
#17. Whoever uses force without Right ... puts himself into a state of War with those, against whom he uses it, and in that state all former Ties are canceled, all other Rights cease, and every one has a Right to defend himself, and to resist the Aggressor.
John Locke
#18. Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.
Jonathan Swift
#19. Reasoned arguments and suggestions which make allowance for the full difficulties of the state of war that exists may help, and will always be listened to with respect and sympathy.
Stafford Cripps
#20. Where I would fault President Bush the most was that, in the wake of 9/11, he motivated our military, but he didn't call the nation into a state of war. And he didn't explain that this would take though a communal effort against common foe.
Frank Miller
#21. The universalism of Islam, in its all-embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political, if not strictly military ... The Jihad, accordingly, may be stated as a doctrine of a permanent state of war, not continuous fighting.
Majid Khadduri
#22. There's no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
Alice Sebold
#23. It is obvious that taking the country from a state of war to being a lawful state won't be easy.
Ahmed Ben Bella
#25. A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. If men are naturally in a state of war, why do they always carry arms and why do they have keys to lock their doors?
Thomas Hobbes
#27. As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.
Charles De Secondat
#28. It is not permissible for a Muslim to buy products of the countries that are in a state of war with Islam and Muslims, for example, Israel.
Ali Al-Sistani
#29. When you recognize this, you also realize that you are now free to give up this futile conflict, this inner state of war.
Eckhart Tolle
#30. With many sovereign states, with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its grievances and ambitions according to the dictates of its own reason or desire - conflict, sometimes leading to war, is bound to occur.
Kenneth Waltz
#31. The State practices "violence," the individual must not do so. The state's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime".
Max Stirner
#32. Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.
Rodney Stark
#33. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.
Steven Pinker
#34. I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war.
Norman Finkelstein
#35. Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.
Carl Jung
#36. Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict.
Jasper Fforde
#37. There are anthropogenic state risks at the existential level as well: the longer we live in an internationally anarchic system, the greater the cumulative chance of a thermonuclear Armageddon or of a great war fought with other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, laying waste to civilization.
Nick Bostrom
#38. It is the conflicting interests of the man and the woman, the home and the shop, the Church and the State, which cause the economic struggle, the war and the strife with which mankind is cursed and which make all long and pray for the reign of peace.
Max Heindel
#39. War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.
Joseph Sobran
#40. An independent state does not pay too dear a price for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them; a state which has lost its independence may find at least some compensation in the fact that its protector procures for it peace with its neighbours.
Theodor Mommsen
#41. A state attacked by another which renews an old claim rarely yields it without a war: it prefers to defend its territory, as is always more honorable. But it may be advantageous to take the offensive, instead of awaiting the attack on the frontiers.
Antoine-Henri Jomini
#42. A few days after my new state occupied my village, I became a prisoner of war rather than a citizen.
Noam Chomsky
#43. The statesman will soon find himself thwarted in some way or other, will deduce from this opposition a menace first to his plans, then to national prestige, and finally to the existence of the state itself - and so, regarding his country as the party attacked, will engage in a war of defence.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#44. 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
#45. A South Carolina native, Miles was a lawyer, a mayor of Charleston, and a congressman. He was one of his state's "fire-eaters," a term applied to men who openly advocated secession rather than finding accomodation with the Union in the summer and fall of 1860.
Clint Johnson
#46. The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
Alan Furst
#47. In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.
Murray N. Rothbard
#48. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#49. No state at war with another state should engage in hostilities of such a kind as to render mutual confidence impossible when peace will have been made.
Immanuel Kant
#50. War is not a natural state. It is an imposition, and a damned unhealthy one. With its rules, we willingly yield our humanity. Speak not of just causes, worthy goals. We are takers of life. Servants of Hood, one and all.
Steven Erikson
#51. Ideology follows the money."
"Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.
Lawrence Samuels
#52. Do you know what geography really is?" Ted asked. "It's not the shapes of countries or a list of trade routes. Geography is a snapshot of war, plain and simple. It's a record of the state of hostile powers at a moment of suspended animation.
Christopher Bollen
#53. From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell
#54. Israel is in the midst of a difficult military and diplomatic campaign against terrorists. An organisation that works to prove allegations that Israel is committing war crimes should be so good as to do so with its own resources and not with civilian national service volunteers and state funds.
Uri Orbach
#55. 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
#56. War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#57. It seems quixotic today, with jet airplanes and overdoses of Nembutal, that a man would go through a war for something so insignificant as his state.
Harper Lee
#58. Aggression is what I do. I go to war. You don't contest football matches in a reasonable state of mind
Roy Keane
#59. If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code
Woodrow Wilson
#60. Oh, the naive Obama State Department. They say we can't kill our way out of war. Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can't. They're dead. We killed 'em.
Sarah Palin
#61. War is a matter of vital importance to the state; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied.
Sun Tzu
#62. As we are now engaged in this contest, all my wishes, all my desires and all the energies of my hand and heart will be given to the cause of my state. Whether we have the right of secession or revolution, I want to see my state triumphant.
Jubal Early
#63. We can guess that the unacceptable conduct of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib resulted in part from the dangerous state of affairs on the ground in a theater of war.
John Yoo
#64. State and local law enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use, the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war.
Michelle Alexander
#65. Rather than concede to the state of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my government in any matter however unimportant, I would see you, and you, and you, and you, and every man, woman and child in the state, dead and buried. This means war.
Nathaniel Lyon
#66. He who first called money the sinews of the state seems to have said this with special reference to war.
Plutarch
#67. There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.
Christopher Hitchens
#68. Peace is not merely an absence of war. It is also a state of mind.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#69. While there are many causes for which a state goes to war, its fundamental object can be epitomized as that of ensuring the continuance of its policy - in face of the determination of the opposing state to pursue a contrary policy. In the human will lies the source and mainspring of conflict.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#70. [The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.
Allen W. Dulles
#71. 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
#72. No government, no head of state, made any attempt to avert or arrest the Boer War.
Charles Albert Gobat
#74. There were three causes that accounted for the proclamation of martial law in Poland. First it was the progressing economic ruin of the country. Second, it was the decomposition of the functioning of the state. And third, a threat of a civil war.
Wojciech Jaruzelski
#75. Throughout the history of the United States , war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance.
Bruce D. Porter
#76. The lowest form of war is To attack Cities. Siege warfare Is a last resort ... The Skillful Strategist Defeats the enemy Without doing battle, Captures the city Without laying siege, Overthrows the enemy state Without protracted war.34
Henry Kissinger
#77. In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.
Arthur Henderson
#78. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
Murray N. Rothbard
#79. 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
#80. No State, upon it own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. Resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally nothing. I therefore consider that the Union is unbroken. There needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless forced upon the national authority.
Abraham Lincoln
#81. War is not a state of being. It is meant to be a temporary chaos between periods of peace. Some want it to be a course of things: a default fact of existence. But I will not let that be so.
Chuck Wendig
#82. If Berlin fell, the US would lose Europe, and if Europe fell into the hands of the Soviet Union and thus added its great industrial plant to the USSR's already great industrial plant, the United States would be reduced to the character of a garrison state if it were to survive at all.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#83. [The Soviets] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth; they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
Ronald Reagan
#84. War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Susan Sontag
#85. While you live, whatever your state while on earth, act the generous and manly part; and never, never, either manually or with the lash of satire, war with the weak
T.J. Llewelyn Prichard
#86. The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
Sun Tzu
#87. The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.
Thomas Szasz
#88. The men who made the war were profuse in their praises of the man who kicked the P.M. out of his office and now degrades by his disloyal, dishonest and lying presence the greatest office in the State.
John Burns
#89. In the American political lexicon, 'change' always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.
Ron Paul
#90. My schooling was disrupted by the shortage of labor during World War I. It meant foregoing high school. Then, late in 1921, I entered upon a short course in agriculture at South Dakota State College. I managed to enter college in 1924, and I was permitted to complete my college work in three years.
Theodore Schultz
#91. I saw clearly how those who saved the state so heroically and courageously in the War of Independence would be capable of bringing a catastrophe upon it if they are given the chance in normal times.
Moshe Sharett
#92. As a nation, we have been responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people at home and abroad by fighting a war that should never have been started and can be won, if at all, only by converting the United States into a police state.
Milton Friedman
#93. Washington ... has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire.
Richard J. Maybury
#94. The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.
George Will
#95. We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.
Johan Huizinga
#96. Many and many a person in Georgia asked me why we did not go to South Carolina; and, when I answered that we were en route for that State, the invariable reply was, - Well, if you will make those people feel the utmost severities of war, we will pardon you for your desolation of Georgia.
William Tecumseh Sherman
#97. War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production.
Simone Weil
#98. You know, people have actually changed the way they think about nuclear weapons now, post-Cold War, post-9/11. The threat of nuclear weapons is not so much Russia attacking the United States, China. It's not a state-to-state - it's obviously terrorism; it's proliferation.
Lawrence Bender
#99. Moreover, if the territorial state is to continue as the last word in the development of society, then war is inevitable.
Christian Lous Lange
