Top 85 War Causes Quotes
#1. We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.
Harry S. Truman
#2. You say a good cause justifies any war; but I say a good war justifies any cause.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. Time is more precious than gold, more precious than diamonds, more precious than oil or any valuable treasures. It is time that we do not have enough of; it is time that causes the war within our hearts, and so we must spend it wisely.
Cecelia Ahern
#4. It is doubtful if a more extensive anthology of errors (William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) concerning the personality and policies of Hitler and the causes and responsibility for the Second World War has ever been assembled, even in war time.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#5. 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
#6. Conflicting economic interest is relatively unimportant as a cause of war.
Frank Knight
#7. In a similar way, The Art of War pinpoints anger and greed as fundamental causes of defeat.
Sun Tzu
#8. Therefore the master of war causes the enemy's forces to yield, but without fighting ; he captures his fortress, but without besieging it ; and without lengthy fighting takes the enemy's kingdom. Without tarnishing his weapons he gains the complete advantage. This is the assault by stratagem.
Sun Tzu
#9. Indeed I am inclined to go so far as to say that the one cause for which one may properly make war is the cause of peace.
Ralph Barton Perry
#10. Now an army is exposed to six several calamities, not arising from natural causes, 1 but from faults for which the general is responsible. These are: (1) Flight; (2) insubordination; (3) collapse; (4) ruin; (5) disorganisation; (6) rout.
Sun Tzu
#11. Among other causes of misfortune which your not being armed brings upon you, it makes you despised ...
Niccolo Machiavelli
#12. Causes of Civil War are also, that the Wealth of the Nation is in too few mens hands, and that no certain means are provided to keep all men from a necessity either to beg, or steal, or be Souldiers.
William Petty
#13. In real life, couples bond and war over a million different things. The causes of divorce are like beautiful, unique snowflakes.
Howard Mittelmark
#14. Our fellow-citizens think they have a right to full information, in a case of such great concernment to them. It is their sweat which is to earn all the expenses of the war, and their blood which is to flow in expiation of the causes of it.
Thomas Jefferson
#15. In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
Herodotus
#16. 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
#17. Those who want war will find causes, no matter how many of them you take away.
Diane Duane
#18. God causes us to promise in time of peace what He exacts from us in time of war; He enables us to make our abandonments in joy, but He requires the fulfilment of them in the midst of much bitterness.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.
Anthony Minghella
#23. Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment.
Cynthia Ozick
#24. War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not many glorious causes for which to fight these days.
Donna Tartt
#25. Population pressure is the ultimate cause of every war.
Alexei Panshin
#26. But Gulf War Syndrome is not one cause, not one illness. It is many causes, many illnesses.
Christopher Shays
#27. Intolerance is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror, and heart and soul breaking of the world.
Betty Smith
#28. To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.
Elihu Root
#29. Wo Hunger herrscht, ist auf die Dauer kein Friede."
("Where there is hunger, there cannot be lasting peace.)
Speech before the United Nations General Assembly, September 26, 1973
Willy Brandt
#30. Lack of self-esteem is what causes wars because people who really love themselves don't go out and try to fight other people ... It's the root of all the problems.
Oprah Winfrey
#31. Armaments do not, generally speaking, cause wars. This notion, the logical crux of all arguments in favor of disarmament, turns the causal relationship upside down. Actually, it is wars, or conflicts threatening war, that cause armaments, not the reverse.
James Burnham
#32. When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.
Janet Flanner
#33. The loss of innocence is inevitable, but the death of innocence disturbs the natural order. The death of innocence causes an imbalance and initiates an internal war that manifests differently in each individual, but almost always includes anger, withdrawal and severe depression.
B.G. Bowers
#34. A central problem with the idea that wars are needed to combat evil is that there is nothing more evil than war. War causes more suffering and death than anything war can be used to combat.
David Swanson
#35. According to the first image of international relations, the locus of the important causes of war is found in the nature and behavior of man. Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity.
Kenneth Waltz
#36. Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble actions and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy.
Linda Grant
#37. I would absolutely refuse any direct or indirect war service and would try to persuade my friends to do the same, regardless of the reasons for the cause of a war.
Albert Einstein
#38. In this world, whenever there is light, there are also shadows. As long as the concept of winners exist, there must also be losers. The selfish desire of wanting to maintain peace causes wars and hatred is born to protect love.
Masashi Kishimoto
#39. The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.
Henry Miller
#40. Sometimes a single battle decides everything and sometimes, too, the slightest circumstance decides the issue of a battle. There is a moment in every battle at which the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority, as one drop of water causes overflow.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#41. Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.
Woodrow Wilson
#42. The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#44. People do not want war. War springs from causes wholly outside the lives, interests, and feelings of the people.
Frederic C. Howe
#45. The Compromise of 1850 provided that the prohibition of slavery should be left up to the individual States, thus thwarting the Canaanites in their attempts to make this problem an excuse for federal intervention and a cause of war between the States.
Eustace Mullins
#46. We had just finished the world's greatest depression and there were many bankrupt companies. But a war causes a demand for almost every product, so during a war almost every company will prosper again. So
Anthony Robbins
#47. No war can end war except a total war which leaves no human creature on earth. Each war creates the causes of war: hate, desire for revenge and have-nots, desperate with need.
Zelda Popkin
#49. A conversation in which the two parties have different beliefs should never begin with the intention of converting the other party to your own beliefs. Every worthwhile conversation's goal should be to understand the other person's opinions and help them understand your own.
Emily Eskowich
#50. A just fear of an imminent danger, though be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.
Francis Bacon
#51. Men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and once taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human.
Hugo Grotius
#52. I used to think that the causes of war were predominantly economic. I came to think that they were more psychological. I am now coming to think that they are decisively "personal," arising from the defects and ambitions of those who have the power to influence the currents of nations.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#53. It's time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause.
Ronald Reagan
#54. The best defence of peace is not power, but the removal of the causes of war, and international agreements which will put peace on a stronger foundation, than the terror of destruction.
Lester B. Pearson
#56. Religion is the cause of all the problems in the world. I don't believe in organized religion at all. It's what separates people. One religion just represents fragments, it causes war. More people have died because of religious conflict than any other reason.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#57. Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#58. Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War.
Jackson Katz
#59. People didn't fight for grand causes or great purposes, but for the closest and most personal of reasons. They might say the fought for high ideals, but in practice they fought for the comrades beside them and their loved ones at home.
Jack Campbell
#60. A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.
Jerry Pournelle
#61. I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating ... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.
Fidel Castro
#62. In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes
Robert Jordan
#63. PTSD in its rawest form is a death sentence which causes many veterans and others to execute themselves in hope to be free.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#64. Real peace is more than the absence of war; it is an absence of the causes of war.
Peace Pilgrim
#65. There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.
Albert Dietrich
#66. I always stood for the elimination of conflict and wars, and any of those causes that ignite them.
Cat Stevens
#67. There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
Honore De Balzac
#68. 5,6. The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.
Sun Tzu
#69. In times of war, it is often best to look to our history to see how past generations of Americans dealt with the loss of their countrymen in just causes.
Virginia Foxx
#70. We are losing the war on cancer because we are on an incessant search for the impossible-to-find cure, when in fact removing the causes is the only way to win.
Joel Fuhrman
#71. War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.
Anthony Marra
#72. Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the "legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago." There are new-born fanaticisms. Convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#73. A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.
Poul Anderson
#74. Peace is the result of an inner state of harmony. It is not obtained by eliminating anything external, it is inside ourselves that we must find and suppress the causes of war.
Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
#75. What thrust us into war were not Hitler's political teachings: the cause, this time, was his successful attempt to establish a new economy. The causes of the war were: envy, greed, and fear.
J. F. C. Fuller
#76. Never on me let such wrath lay hold, as the wrath you cherish, you whose valor causes harm!
A.T. Murray
#77. In war, important events result from trivial causes.
Julius Caesar
#78. Love causes war and causes death, breaks souls and breaks lives. It runs people into the ground, makes them behave like moronic, immoral beasts, before it dances off, leaving only destruction in its wake - hearts blown wide open for the whole world to see.
Karina Halle
#79. Bravery without forethought, causes a man to fight blindly and desperately like a mad bull. Such an opponent, must not be encountered with brute force, but may be lured into an ambush and slain.
Sun Tzu
#80. We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.
Neville Chamberlain
#81. I must fight
Til I have conquered
In myself
what causes war
Marianne Moore
#82. The war is just when the intention that causes it to be undertaken is just. The will is therefore the principle element that must be considered, not the means ... He who intends to kill the guilty sometimes faultlessly shed the blood of the innocents ... '
In short, the end justifies the means.
Henry Kissinger
#83. Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.
Thomas Merton
#84. Then also pretexts for seizing property are never wanting, and one who begins to live by rapine will always find some reason for taking the goods of others, whereas causes for taking life are rarer and more quickly destroyed.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#85. Lightly armed nations can move toward war just as easily as those which are armed to the teeth, and they will do so if the usual causes of war are not removed.
Ludwig Quidde