Top 100 War Enemy Quotes
#1. When [men] go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace.
Saint Augustine
#2. The War is not don so long as my Enemy lives.
[The war is not done so long as my enemy lives.]
George Herbert
#3. Number one, that it is smart to communicate and negotiate with your enemy instead of just waging war with bombs and weapons of mass destruction.
Theodore C. Sorensen
#4. We are at war with enemies that still have the intent to do further damage to Americans at home and abroad.
Bradley A. Blakeman
#5. The enemy is at the gate. It is a question of life and death.
Andrei Zhdanov
#6. When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end.
Orson Scott Card
#7. From the point of the view of the nation's power, it was obvious that while we were fighting the Sino-Japanese war, every effort was to be made to avoid adding to our enemies and opening additional fronts.
Hideki Tojo
#8. If equally matched, we can offer battle; if slightly inferior in numbers, we can avoid the enemy; if quite unequal in every way, we can flee from him. Though an obstinate fight may be made by a small force, in the end it must be captured by the larger force.
Sun Tzu
#9. 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
#10. There is no avoiding war, it can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#11. The abuse of prisoners hurts America's cause in the war on terror, endangers U.S. service members who might be captured by the enemy, and is anathema to the values Americans have held dear for generations.
John McCain
#12. To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy.
Sun Tzu
#13. The enemy has assailed my outposts in heavy force. I have fallen back on the line of Bull Run and will make a stand at Mitchell's Ford.
P. G. T. Beauregard
#14. Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate.
Sun Tzu
#15. Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.
Sun Tzu
#16. So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world.
Pankaj Mishra
#17. But Polybius brought out the basic lesson in his reflection-'for as a ship, if you deprive it of its steersman, falls with all its crew into the hands of the enemy; so, with an army in war, if you outwit or out-manoeuvere its general, the whole will often fall into your hands'.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#18. When the enemy is at ease, be able to weary him; when well fed, to starve him; when at rest, to make him move. Appear at places to which he must hasten; move swiftly where he does not expect you.
Sun Tzu
#19. Revolutionary war is an antitoxin which not only eliminates the enemy's poison but also purges us of our own filth.
Mao Zedong
#21. Our pre-9/11 gun laws allow our enemies in the War on Terror to arm themselves right here in our own country.
Carolyn McCarthy
#22. One of the reasons not to have a big long war with your traditional enemy is that you're not thinking about the third party, and it's always the third party that benefits.
Gary Brecher
#23. Even if my country remains in war with yours ... remember ... i am not your enemy.
A.J. Cronin
#24. In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last
George Orwell
#25. We experience problem-solving sessions as war zones, we view competing ideas as enemies, and we use problems as weapons to blame and defeat opposition forces. No wonder we can't come up with real lasting solutions!
Margaret J. Wheatley
#26. The art of war," I told him, "is to make the enemy do your bidding.
Bernard Cornwell
#27. Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
Lewis Thomas
#28. The best thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai. We should have focused less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends.
Craig M. Mullaney
#29. We are Americans first, Americans last, Americans always, ... Let us argue our differences. But remember we are not enemies, but comrades in a war against a real enemy.
John McCain
#30. I can recall no parallel in history where a great nation recently at war has so distinguished its former enemy commander.
Douglas MacArthur
#31. 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
#32. Feeling of hatred unto your enemy,
drains your energy as enemy wanted.
Toba Beta
#33. Cartoons in newspapers have proven to be an effective means of rallying support during times of war, often by the simple device of depicting the enemy as subhuman or even monstrous - much as they did during the Reformation.
Thomas Conley
#34. War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.
Jeannette Rankin
#35. Can't be on the front lines fighting a war with the weapons given to you by the enemy.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#36. We should always go before our enemies with confidence, otherwise our apparent uneasiness inspires them with greater boldness.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#37. The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn't win by thinking inside the box and following someone else's rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you.
Brad Thor
#38. Forgetfulness of God's grace is one of the greatest tools in the enemy's war against our souls.
Mark Dever
#39. When a general, unable to estimate the enemy's strength, allows an inferior force to engage a larger one, or hurls a weak detachment against a powerful one, and neglects to place picked soldiers in the front rank, the result must be rout.
Sun Tzu
#40. Invincibility depends on one's self; the enemy's vulnerability on him.
Sun Tzu
#41. No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.
Gregory Maguire
#43. When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.
Sun Tzu
#44. Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled enemy?
Sylvia Plath
#45. By fighting a limited, defensive war, America permitted the enemy to endlessly re-supply their field armies.
Nguyen Cao Ky
#46. I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about.
Scott Shane
#47. I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims.
Gore Vidal
#48. If the enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in.
Sun Tzu
#49. Especially today as we fight the war on terror - against an enemy that represents hatred, extremism and stands behind no flag - we need to remember the sacrifices that have gone into protecting our flag.
Bill Shuster
#50. You must never believe that the enemy does not know how to conduct his own affairs. Indeed, if you want to be deceived less and want to bear less danger, the more the enemy is weak or the less the enemy is cautious, so much more must you esteem him.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#51. 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
#52. Airpower has become predominant, both as a deterrent to war, and-in the eventuality of war-as the devastating force to destroy an enemy's potential and fatally undermine his will to wage war.
Omar N. Bradley
#53. The lady is almost the only picturesque survival in a social order which tends less and less to tolerate the exceptional ... In the age-long war between men and women, she is a hostage in the enemy's camp. Her fortunes do not rise and fall with those of women but with those of men.
Emily James Smith Putnam
#54. New terms used like, 'overseas contingency operation' instead of the word 'war' - that reflects a worldview that is out of touch with the enemy that we face. We can't spin our way out of this threat.
Sarah Palin
#55. It is the rule in war, if ten times the enemy's strength, surround them; if five times, attack them; if double, be able to divide them; if equal, engage them; if fewer, be able to evade them; if weaker, be able to avoid them.
Sun Tzu
#56. Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
Sun Tzu
#58. Supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy.
Sun Tzu
#59. 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
#60. Defeating the enemy through deception with little loss of life is better than fighting face-to-face with the loss of many lives on both sides.
Aleksandra Layland
#61. A war was coming. No, it had already started. Vampires versus demons. Demons versus wolves. The enemy of my enemy ... Is my husband.
Cynthia Eden
#62. Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy ... use the conquered foe to augment one's own strength.
Sun Tzu
#63. 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
#64. When the higher officers are angry and insubordinate, and on meeting the enemy give battle on their own account from a feeling of resentment, before the commander-in-chief can tell whether or not he is in a position to fight, the result is ruin.
Sun Tzu
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)
Rosa Brooks
#68. 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
#69. As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived.
Daniel Morgan
#70. And with all of the enemy's citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don't even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the Belt has rocks that will turn the surface of Mars into a molten sea.
James S.A. Corey
#71. 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
#72. Why does anyone fight a war? To protect a way of life, to find or support loved ones. To avenge those lost. Or maybe because it's a calling. Because someone has to. Because there's a line no enemy should be allowed to cross.
Tracy Banghart
#73. How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#74. Guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret and to get out of bodies every time there's an air raid or the enemy fires a rocket or something.
Kurt Vonnegut
#75. 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
#76. The first law of war is to preserve ourselves and destroy the enemy.
Mao Zedong
#77. When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away ...
Sun Tzu
#78. If now we were livingin the Revolutionary War and George Washington he being arrested through Britain. For sure he, they would consider him enemy combatant. But American, they consider him as hero.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
#79. Never mind of what your enemy thinks of you, relax and think a head of him.
Auliq Ice
#80. I don't believe in making war with food. Food is not the enemy.
Said by Claire in The 5th Horseman
James Patterson
#81. If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need to do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way.
Sun Tzu
#82. No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.
Phyllis Schlafly
#83. Be where your enemy is not.
Sun Tzu
#84. Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#85. It's a fucked-up war when you are more worried about fighting your chain of command than the actual enemy.
Eric Blehm
#86. Israel lost its war. Will Assad's enemies lose, too?
Robert Fisk
#87. If there was anything the last year had taught her - if there was anything Caleb had taught her, the Metigen War had taught her - it was that perspective was everything.
If you wanted to understand your enemy, you must understand that they were the hero in their own story.
G.S. Jennsen
#88. The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy.
Vladimir Lenin
#89. Psychology is a soft weapon but you can take out
more enemy battalions with leaflets and radio broadcasts than with high explosives.
Nelson DeMille
#90. The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.
Samuel Johnson
#91. Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.
Vladimir Lenin
#92. Let the enemy fall by their swords. Words not worth reading die their own death. But our Words will be Told!
K.A. Gunn
#93. As president I would actually name the enemy, radical Islamic terrorists. We've got a president [ Barack Obama] who wants to apologize for America and wants to criticize medieval Christian and wants to wage war on junk food. He won't even say the words "radical Islamic terrorists."
Bobby Jindal
#94. What the country needs is the annihilation of the enemy.
Horatio Nelson
#95. This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy.
Ishmael Beah
#96. And therefore those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle and are not brought there by him.
Sun Tzu
#97. This does not mean that the enemy is to be allowed to escape. The object is to make him believe that there is a road to safety, and thus prevent his fighting with the courage of despair. After that, you may crush him.
Sun Tzu
#98. We're at war.
On the verge of an apocalypse filled with monsters and torture in a nightmare world.
And I'm standing here, a moonstruck teenager pining for an enemy soldier. What am I, crazy?
This time, I'm the first to turn away.
Susan Ee
#99. The true soldier knows nothing but war, and the true soldier, for lack of an enemy, attacks himself.
Dan Groat
#100. Anything that protracted a campaign Clausewitz condemned. "Gradual reduction" of the enemy, or a war of attrition, he feared like the pit of hell.
Barbara W. Tuchman
