The Virtues Of War Quotes

#1. Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage, and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution.

Alec Guinness

#2. They passed a succession of granite monuments to the conquering magicians of the late Victorian age and the fallen heroes of the Great War, then a few monolithic sculptures representing Ideal Virtues (Patriotism, Respect for Authority, the Dutiful Wife).

Jonathan Stroud

#3. Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

J.B. Priestley

#4. But what has America to boast? What are the graces or the virtues which distinguish its inhabitants? What are their triumphs in war, or their inventions in peace?

Thomas Day

#5. Truth and non-violence are not cloistered virtues but applicable as much in the forum and the legislatures as in the market place.

Mahatma Gandhi

#6. Take care, father," said Bulloch gently, "that what you call murder and robbery may not really be war and conquest, those sacred foundations of empires, those sources of all human virtues and all human greatness.

Anatole France

#7. There are good points about all ... wars. People forget self. The virtues of magnanimity, courage, patriotism, etc., are called into life. People are more generous, more sympathetic, better, than when engaged in the more selfish pursuits of peace.

Rutherford B. Hayes

#8. To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

George Orwell

#9. It seems to me that the only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war: mountains and seafaring are the only ones I know. But it must be something sufficiently serious not to be a game and sufficiently dangerous to exercise those virtues which otherwise get no chance.

Freya Stark

#10. [The South] is ****ed for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.

Richard M. Weaver

#11. To ... not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues.

Sun Tzu

#12. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

Thomas Hobbes

#13. Life is war. By implication, life in itself places humanity with the need for battle in the struggle for success

Michael Quansah

#14. In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#15. If we read history with an open mind, we cannot fail to conclude that, among all the military virtues, the energetic conduct of war has always contributed most to glory and success.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#16. To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.

Thomas Hobbes

#17. Every nation has its prestigious military academies - or so few of them - that reach not only the virtues of peace but also the art of attaining it? I mean attaining and protecting it by means other than weapons, the tools of war. Why are we surprised whenever war recedes and yields to peace?

Elie Wiesel