War Book Quotes

#1. Is it an anti-war book?" "Yes," I said. "I guess." "You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?" "No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?

Kurt Vonnegut

#2. 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,

#3. I'm working on a large project which I hope will become a book. A war book.' 'Hasn't someone already written that one?

Jo Nesbo

#4. 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

#5. You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?

Kurt Vonnegut

#6. An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo is the classical text-book instance.

T.E. Lawrence

#7. When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.

Mahatma Gandhi

#8. Churchill's 2,054 page book "Second World War" makes no mention of genocide or the murder of Jews. Coincidentally, Churchill was a strong proponent of eugenic legislation prior to the outbreak of WWII.

A.E. Samaan

#9. 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

#10. It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. And the duke was called the duke of Tintagil.

Thomas Malory

#11. Further, nothing, except sin, is contrary to an act of virtue. But war is contrary to peace. Therefore war is always a sin.

Thomas Aquinas

#12. Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.

Fiona McIntosh

#13. I believe he's got a lot of courage to write that book. If the Axis had lost the war, we'd be able to say and write anything we wanted, like we used to; we'd be one country and we'd have a fair legal system, the same one for all of us.

Philip K. Dick

#14. When I wrote War Against the Mafia as a Vietnam statement, I didn't expect much to come of it-but quite a bit came and it captured me. I continued the books to feed the obvious hunger that was there for heroic fiction.

Don Pendleton

#15. 'The Pushcart War' is presented as a history of a conflict that has not yet taken place; in each edition of the book, the date on which the hostilities commenced is nudged forward.

Adam Mansbach

#16. 'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.

Adrian McKinty

#17. Well old man, I guess freedom's a continuum.

Nicholas Hochstedler

#18. You hide a Jew. You pay. Somehow or other, you must.

Markus Zusak

#19. The book of war, the one we've been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.

Max Brooks

#20. I reached over, opened it in the middle, and began reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.

Charles Bukowski

#21. With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

David McCullough

#22. The most valuable real estate for a man is the woman's mind.
Many bloody battles have been fought for her mind space!

Sanjai Velayudhan

#23. 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.

Tim O'Brien

#24. 'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.

Annalee Newitz

#25. But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.

Isaac D'Israeli

#26. Forth from the war emerging,a book I have made, the words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything, a book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect, but you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

Walt Whitman

#27. Whoever thinks war allows for lasting victories should take a look at European history books and learn their lesson.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier

#28. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;

Donald Miller

#29. I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

Jane Green

#30. What's interesting is that when you get into the post-war period, many of the narratives in books and movies conclude that if you killed Hitler, you're actually going to make history worse.

Gavriel David Rosenfeld

#31. I saw a film today, oh boy,
The English army had just won the war,
A crowd of people turned away,
But I just had to look, having read the book ...

The Beatles

#32. Instead of giving it [war] a rest I continued pursuing more research, talking to more people on the subject as if I was to please this aftermath of the book by knowledge that was more historical and psychological than literary and aesthetical.

Sasa Stanisic

#33. That doesn't sound like civil war to me," said Gaylen, turning back to his book with a smile. "It only sounds silly."
"Of course it's silly," said the Prime Minister impatiently. "But a lot of serious things start silly.

Natalie Babbitt

#34. It's much different today than it was during the Cold War. The CIA is not the subject of many books anymore. But that might change, because of international terrorism and Red China.

Nelson DeMille

#35. We learned that a former prisoner of war had more to teach us about what it takes to find a path to greatness than most books on corporate strategy.

James C. Collins

#36. And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.

Michael Berryman

#37. Mac [Barnett ] and I have been friends for more than ten years. We met working at an educational nonprofit. And we have been pranking each other the whole time. It's our own version of a prank war. We thought we would channel some of that energy into writing a book.

Jory John

#38. Books are the best of things if well used; if abused, among the worst. They are good for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#39. One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.

Ernest Hemingway,

#40. The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. [ ... ] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.

Camille Paglia

#41. Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

Lawrence Block

#42. Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.

John Colville

#43. The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

J.K. Rowling

#44. When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.

Vladislav Tamarov

#45. This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

Erich Maria Remarque

#46. 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

#47. And so, I mean, he declared war right there and then in so many words and Alex says later in the book, nobody in the White House from that point on had any doubt that we were going to bomb the mainland of Asia.

James Stockdale

#48. 'Dare to Discipline' was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed.

James Dobson

#49. One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

George Packer

#50. This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

A. N. Wilson

#51. When you think about the current present value of the fossil fuel reserves that are on the books, the current fossil fuel companies, the last time that that much wealth was at stake was when the South fought the Civil War,

Chris Hayes

#52. And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I just stared in amazement. 'It's in the gospel book,' he explained sheepishly, 'and it just cam to mind.

Bernard Cornwell

#53. I'm reminded of a book my father used to read me," she said. "A bunch of elves and things get into a huge war over a piece of jewelry that everybody wants but nobody can wear.

Lemony Snicket

#54. Das war ein vorspeil nur; That was only a prelude; dort wo man Buecher verbrennt, Where one burns books, vebrennt man auch am Ende One will also burn people Menchen. Eventually.

Heinrich Heine

#55. Did you know that at one time trick-or-treating was stopped? It's true. During World War II children were not allowed to trick or treat because there was a sugar shortage.

Linda Bozzo

#56. From the Book of Mormon, we learn how disciples of Christ live in times of war.

Ezra Taft Benson

#57. I do not think anyone can read War and Peace too much. I read it six times ...

Maxwell Perkins

#58. There's no way the writing staff of 'Game of Thrones' haven't read 'The Art of War.' There's definitely an influence on 'Game of Thrones' from this book in both a general way and on the character of Lord Baelish and his strategies.

Aidan Gillen

#59. I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.

Phil Klay

#60. It really isn't hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery - you just put in a few lines like "Don't take sex slaves!" and "When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don't rape any of them!" And yet God couldn't seem to manage it.

Sam Harris

#61. I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#62. One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing
being a data bank
and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.

Peter Greenaway

#63. The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.

H.L. Mencken

#64. I am rather more apt to read old books than new ones.

Theodore Roosevelt

#65. One of the main reasons I wanted to work on 'World War Z' was because I'm a huge fan of the book, and I love the idea of taking a non-linear story and creating a three-act structure out of it.

Marc Forster

#66. Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

Susan Sontag

#67. And I know just's well as anybody that if you control a man's space and time then you control his whole goddamn life: he's a goner, cause hell, there ain't nothin' for him to do in space and time but make the few choices he can make with what he got.

Nicholas Hochstedler

#68. Hello? War and Peace." "You've read War and Peace?" "Um, do I look like I have time to read a book as long as Oksana Chusovitina's career?

Lauren Hopkins

#69. A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

Umberto Eco

#70. I met Heinlein after 'The Forever War' had won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He shook my hand and said he loved the book so much, he'd read it three times.

Joe Haldeman

#71. Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.

Terry Pratchett

#72. My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.

David McCullough

#73. So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

Abraham Lincoln

#74. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we all got along. If there were no terrorism, Islamophobia, Western hypocrisy, corrupt government in African countries (especially Liberia), sexism, nativism, people like Donald Trump, stereotypes, war, Capitalism, Communism, Marxism and xenophobia.

Henry Johnson Jr

#75. It is safer to face a strong enemy in the field of battle, than to fight a war by the side of a weak friend.

Luis Marques

#76. After the German occupation of Holland in May 1940, the last two dark years of the war I spent hiding indoors from the Nazis, eating tulip bulbs to fill the stomach and reading Kramers' book "Quantum Theorie des Elektrons und der Strahlung" by the light of a storm lamp.

Nicolaas Bloembergen

#77. Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.

Jayne Anne Phillips

#78. I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.'

Jesse Ventura

#79. To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

Sebastian Faulks

#80. Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.

Stephen Jay Gould

#81. Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

Mem Fox

#82. I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.

Lauren Weisberger

#83. It's what I'll be singing in the morning. It won't be God Save the Ruddy King or All Things bleeding Bright and Beautiful. It'll be Orange and Lemons for Big Joe, for all of us.

Michael Morpurgo

#84. Book cover, 'Reefer Club' Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.

Newt Gingrich

#85. The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception.

Guy Vanderhaeghe

#86. In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the consequences should war occur despite our efforts to avoid it.

Herman Kahn

#87. The men in this book are fictitious characters but their counterparts can be found in cockpits all over the world. Now they are flying a war. Tomorrow they will be flying a peace, for, regardless of the world's condition, flying is their life.

Ernest K. Gann

#88. I watched the Star Wars trilogy with some good friends of mine for the first time in a few years, I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies-one of those first mashup books-and then I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with my family.

Ian Doescher

#89. Bright was the summer of 1296. The war which had desolated Scotland was then at an end.

Jane Porter

#90. The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.

Philip Pullman

#91. I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

Asne Seierstad

#92. To The Veterans of the United States of America
Thank you, for the cost you paid for our freedom, thank you for the freedom to live in safety and pursue happiness, for freedom of speech (thus my book), and for all the freedoms that we daily take for granted.

Sara Niles

#93. Book four is tentatively titled 'The Skull Throne ,' and book five is 'The Core .' It's kind of hard to talk much about them without giving away things from 'Daylight War,' however.

Peter V. Brett

#94. What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.

Susan Sontag

#95. If you want to learn the craft of war, ponder over this book. The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly.

Miyamoto Musashi

#96. Sometimes a soldier returns home and all he can do is share his story in the hopes that somehow, in some way, it helps another soldier make sense of things. And although the stories may not be perfect, sometimes just sharing is enough to make a difference.

Michael Anthony

#97. Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.

Robert Kennedy

#98. Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: 'Do not march on Moscow' ... Rule 2 is: Do not go fighting with your land armies in China.

Bernard Law Montgomery

#99. If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

#100. Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory ... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.

Franklin D. Roosevelt