Top 100 The War In Quotes
#1. We live in a world of wars and wars alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you'll notice one curious fact about them, they all suffer, they all die, and sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most.
Frederick Lenz
#2. To me, every fundamentalist Muslim, no matter how peaceable in his own behavior, is part of a murderous movement and is thus, in some fashion, a foot soldier in the war that bin Laden has launched against civilization.
Daniel Pipes
#3. The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#4. Since the outbreak of war, there has been in our country a steady increase in the consumption of spirits, wine and beer. It is estimated that in dollar volume, the annual outlay is now practically double what it was before the war.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
#5. I knew right then and there that I would become as courageous as I needed in order to keep him safe. I thought of the soldiers and bullets that I hid from in Asmara. I would stand and fight them to keep Fili safe.
Abeba Habtu
#6. So I ask the nuclear powers to abandon the out-of-date thinking of the Cold War period and take a fresh look. Above all, I appeal to them to bear in mind the long-term threat that nuclear weapons pose to humankind and to begin action towards their elimination.
Joseph Rotblat
#7. Each returning soldier is an in-the-flesh memoir of war. Their chapters might vary, but similar imagery fills the pages, and the theme of every book is the same
profound change. The big question became, could I live with that kind of change?
Ellen Hopkins
#8. I can tell you this: If I'm ever in a position to call the shots, I'm not going to rush to send somebody else's kids into a war.
George H. W. Bush
#9. What we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues.
Thomas Friedman
#10. The cold war was the longest war in United States history. Because of the nuclear capabilities of our enemy it was the most dangerous conflict our country ever faced. Those that won this war did so in obscurity. Those that gave their lives in the cold war have never been properly honored.
Harry Reid
#11. If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.
Arlen Specter
#12. We are a country that has many friends, many allies, when we operate in the world, we operate with friends and allies that's been true for decades and if we wind up going to war in Iraq it will be true in Iraq.
Douglas Feith
#13. As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.
Asne Seierstad
#14. Hardly had I left when we ran into the Korean war, doubled what I had asked for and doubled it again. I had told him I would stay in Government, be honored to, but not with the Air Force.
Stuart Symington
#15. In the half-reclined bed, Yaz slept, mouth open, snoring - probably doped. Mike turned on the TV. For twenty minutes, he watched retired generals on CNN discussing Afghanistan and troop surges as though they knew what the hell war was all about.
Pete Barber
#16. I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
George S. McGovern
#17. Blood mixture and the result drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.
Adolf Hitler
#18. If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work.
Henry L. Stimson
#19. Some people think that nothing moves in this world without leave of the woman. Do not know more, but I can say that war never happened, nor can there be, when you do not want to leave sovereign
Jose De Alencar
#20. The role of the military is to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place.
George W. Bush
#21. Why,' said he, 'does not the emperor, who has devised so many clever and efficient modes of improving the art of war, organize a regiment of lawyers, judges and legal practitioners, sending them in the hottest fire the enemy could maintain, and using them to save better men?
Alexandre Dumas
#22. In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.
Ron Paul
#23. The combination of professionalism and technology may also result in narrow-minded specialization more suited to a debating society than to an organization whose task it is to cope with, and indeed live in, the dangerous and uncertain environment of war.
Martin Van Creveld
#24. 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
#25. But in the secret camps, the war against the Islamic religion was more than obvious.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
#26. The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.
Arnold Bennett
#27. If you want to go anywhere in modern war, in the air, on the sea, on the land, you must have command of the air.
William Halsey
#28. Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war.
Bernard Cornwell
#29. Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#30. That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans.
Scott Ritter
#31. Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?
Bianca Jagger
#32. In this room we understand why this war might be fought ... it's about our common belief that no one has the right to tell two creatures that they cannot love each other
no matter what their species.
Deborah Harkness
#33. The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. The French couldn't hate us any more unless we helped 'em out in another war.
Will Rogers
#35. No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings.
Kelly Link
#36. We don't propose to sit here in our rocking chair with our hands folded and let the Communists set up any government in the Western Hemisphere.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#38. Milosevic will never stop, because he is fighting for personal power in Serbia. The only way to stop him is cutting the functioning of his war machine. He is spending $1.7 million a day on his war machine in Kosovo.
Fatos Nano
#39. The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#40. 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
#41. The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings: But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings.
Julian Grenfell
#42. Studio press agents make up anything they want to, and reporters go along with it. One flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery. If it is a 'bionic face,' why didn't they do a better job of it?
Jack Palance
#43. It must be instilled in man that 'peace' is the best legacy we would leave behind for the generations to come, as we practice and follow the edicts of human rights.
Henrietta Newton Martin
#44. You come across [online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it's a very dehumanizing thing,It's almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing ... My hope is, as we get out of it, we'll reach the next level of conscience.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#45. China invaded India, and there was a war between India and China in some of the disputed terrain in 1962, and India got hurt by that.
Wesley Clark
#46. 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
#47. I knew by experience and by observing many of my friends the baneful, destructive effect which participation in a war has on almost every man.
(from 'The Specter of Alexander Wolf')
Gaito Gazdanov
#48. While no man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China, and such was never given a thought, the new situation did urgently demand a drastic revision of strategic planning if our political aim was to defeat this new enemy as we had defeated the old.
Douglas MacArthur
#49. The soldier 's courage and sacrifice is full of glory , expressing devotion to country , to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious , and we must never trumpet it as such.
Barack Obama
#50. With Midway as the turning point, the fortunes of war appeared definitely to shift from our own to the Allied side. The defeat taught us many lessons and impelled our Navy, for the first time since the outbreak of war, to indulge in critical self-examination.
Mitsuo Fuchida
#51. Feminism has fought no wars ... killed no opponents ... set up no concentration camps ... starved no enemies ... practiced no cruelty. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety in the streets ... for reforms in the law.
Dale Spender
#52. This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.
But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#53. Somehow whether or not the war is winnable is beyond our scope, an irrelevant detail. We don't do it to win anymore; we do it because it's what we know how to do. Get ready to go. Get ready to come back. And the moments in between we mark on the calendar. It's our battle rhythm.
Angela Ricketts
#54. When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn't stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.
Douglas Brinkley
#55. Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on.
Billy Graham
#56. In war, God is always on your side, no matter which side you're on. God is invincible, but one side always loses. Nobody seems to see the fallacy in this.
Elliot MacDonald
#57. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.
Marie Colvin
#58. I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day when he said, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said 'No ... but I served in a company of heroes.'
Richard Winters
#59. With regard to ground of this nature, be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots, and carefully guard your line of supplies. Then you will be able to fight with advantage.
Sun Tzu
#60. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#61. For us who are now in power, we need to be challenged to serve the people and ignore our own egos and personal interests so that we can really demonstrate to other African states that it is possible to share power without going to war.
Wangari Maathai
#62. Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre - Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread.
David S. Reynolds
#63. Unfortunately, we have warring in the world, so the youngest minds, the brilliant minds, are sent off to war. I think that, you know, you have brilliant people with great possibilities and that's why I really am not really for war. I really am not.
Stevie Wonder
#64. President Bush admitted that the United States went to war in Iraq based on bad intelligence. But he says knowing what we know now he would still do it again. So at least we're learning from our mistakes.
Jay Leno
#65. 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
#66. Peace in the Middle East isn't going to be created by another war or violent act on the other side.
Mandy Patinkin
#67. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."34
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#68. The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#69. Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.
Ron Paul
#70. 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
#71. All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.
Leon Uris
#72. It is a war of light vs. darkness, of Christ vs. antichrist, the Word of God vs. secular humanism. There will be a winner and a loser!.. There is no compromise with the enemy. There is no neutrality in this war!
John Hagee
#73. In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.
George Clooney
#74. In 'Sisters of War,' I got to do one of my own stunts. Running out of the building because the Japanese were firing, with all these little spark plugs are going off, looking like explosions and bullets flying down. That was really fun.
Sarah Snook
#75. If Peking wasn't stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as "the military colossus of the East." U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world's new nations would gravitate toward neutralism.
William Manchester
#76. 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
#77. This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.
Karl Marlantes
#78. From a scientific perspective there is some indication that a nuclear war could deplete the earth's ozone layer or, less likely, could bring on a new Ice Age - but there is no suggestion that either the created order or mankind would be destroyed in the process.
Herman Kahn
#79. Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.
Eugene B. Sledge
#80. I averted my eyes, looked around, and stumbled through all the faces in the room till they finally rested on his. He was standing like a scared bird, waving one wing and using the other to hide his scar. Aya Rabah- Scars
Refaat Alareer
#81. War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.
Sebastian Junger
#82. spite of the tragedy in her childhood and the ever-present press of war, she had mostly considered herself happy. There was almost always something to take delight in, if you were trying.
Laini Taylor
#83. There were strange noises in the room, great bellowing sobs that did not sound like anything human. They bounced off the wals, echoing in her ears. Stop! she wanted to cry at the person who was making the noise. Then she realised that it was her.
Kate Williams
#84. 'The war in Iraq - if Osama was a Christian - it's the Christmas present he never would have expected.
Michael Scheuer
#85. I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.
Barack Obama
#86. Go back," he said.
"Can't. Stand aside?"
"Can't."
"So it's like that?" I said.
Fix exhaled. Then he nodded. "Yeah."
And for the first time in a decade the Winter Knight and Summer Knight went to war.
Jim Butcher
#87. War is the action of low man: Low in morality, low in humanity, and low in all the good values!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#88. In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
Marquis De Sade
#89. What is compelling with 'War Horse' is the jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring craftsmanship in this movie.
Stacey Snider
#90. A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.
George Bernard Shaw
#91. Supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy.
Sun Tzu
#92. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
Graham Greene
#93. We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.
Neil Sheehan
#94. If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated.
Denise Riley
#95. I get why no one bothers with the usual rules," ... "I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what's the point?" ... "Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else.
Paula McLain
#96. In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Read more at
Leo Tolstoy
#97. I am one who believes that we are, in fact, engaged in a worldwide war against terrorism. We must have the serenity to accept the fact that war is not going to go away if we ignore it.
Robert Foster Bennett
#98. With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relative, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army ...
Robert E.Lee
#99. Well, politics is war, and in war, truth is the first casualty.
Jeff Greenfield
#100. Sometimes, war being the unjust and drastic creature it is, those in whom he invested hopes took an arrow in the chest, the useless, by chance, thrived to irritate him another day.
Paul Hoffman
