Top 100 War History Quotes
#1. Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.
Geraldine Brooks
#2. I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.
Steve Zahn
#3. Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
Winston Churchill
#4. 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
#5. If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
Eric Schmidt
#6. A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to publicly wage a terrorist war against America, saying, and I quote, "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They're all targets." Their mission is murder, and their history is bloody.
William J. Clinton
#7. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
Victor Davis Hanson
#8. I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.
Michael McCormick
#9. The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.
Bruce Catton
#10. This war is not necessary. We are truly sleepwalking through history.
Robert Byrd
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.
Philippa Gregory
#14. The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler
#15. History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. To keep the peace, we and our allies must be strong enough to convince any potential aggressor that war could bring no benefit, only disaster.
Ronald Reagan
#16. 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
#17. War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can't be bettered learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget.
Robert Graff
#18. With the likely nominations of Barack Obama by the Democrats and John McCain by the Republicans, one of these two parties is headed for a 2009 crack-up that could prove as messy as any party civil war in recent history.
Chuck Todd
#19. Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.
J.G. Ballard
#20. 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
#21. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.
Kristin Hannah
#22. I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.
Stephen Daldry
#23. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#24. American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.
Camille Paglia
#25. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#26. God grant that this is the work of the Communists. You are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.
Adolf Hitler
#27. It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.
Randall Wallace
#28. Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
#29. Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.
Vidkun Quisling
#30. We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.
Douglas Brinkley
#31. [M]ore wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day.
Charles Kimball
#32. But all history has taught us the grim lesson that no nation has ever been successful in avoiding the terrors of war by refusing to defend its rights - by attempting to placate aggression.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#33. World War One is an important part of Ireland's multi-layered history during which tens of thousands Irish people lost their lives.
Martin McGuinness
#34. East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.
William Kirby
#35. We are Americans, speaking the same language, adopting the same customs, holding the same general opinions ... and shall rise and fall with Americans.
Frederick Douglass
#36. Doctors in 1945 would report that one of Berlin's children's favorite games was 'rape.' When they saw a man in uniform
even a Salvation Army uniform
they would start screaming hysterically.
Andrei Cherny
#37. Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War.
Breyten Breytenbach
#38. World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
Jon Meacham
#39. When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.
Dick Pirozzolo
#40. Our union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.
James Buchanan
#41. As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.
Kim Thuy
#42. War is always a contest of words as well as of wounds.
Samuel Moyn
#43. Istory is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade ...
Jack Kerouac
#44. These descendants divined myths in what was really history, for true memories were forgotten in chaos as vast arrays of daivi astras used in the Great War ravaged the land. That war destroyed almost everything. It took centuries for India to regain its old cultural vigour and intellectual depth.
Amish Tripathi
#45. In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#46. '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
#47. '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
#48. What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
Jonathan Sacks
#49. Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.
Lebbeus Woods
#50. 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
#51. The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.
Harold Holzer
#52. Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins.
Rob Thomas
#53. Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium
Horace
#54. In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close.
Sun Tzu
#55. If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.
Johan Huizinga
#56. If history only remembers one in a thousand of us, then that future will be filled with stories of who we were and what we did.
Electronic Arts
#58. I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe.
Sandor Marai
#59. Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
Jesmyn Ward
#60. To die,
so young to die.
No, no, not I,
I love the warm sunny skies,
light, song, shining eyes,
I want no war, no battle cry,
No, no, not I.
Hannah Senesh
#61. History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.
Terry Pratchett
#62. The course of George St. Leger Grenfell's life was a continuing act of violence against the sanctities of Victorian life, and especially against its inmost essence, the family. And indeed, the large Grenfell family was an overpowering aggregation, even by the ample Victorian standard.
Stephen Z. Starr
#63. The young man looked down from the cart at the people in front of him. Jonah felt his teacher's eyes meet his own, and for a fraction of a second a smile played on the prisoner's lips. Then he glanced toward heaven and spoke. I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
Anna Myers
#64. History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation's spirit can be achieved.
Aysha Taryam
#65. If the instigation for jihad [holy war] against the Jews and the Americans ... is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal.
Osama Bin Laden
#66. In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.
Thomas Harding
#67. How could one of the most important and unbelievable moments in art history - not to mention the history of a world war - simply become a forgotten footnote? But that's exactly what happened.
Robert M. Edsel
#68. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
Leela Corman
#69. War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.
Ruth Benedict
#70. No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
Hilary Mantel
#71. World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.
Ken Follett
#72. Suppressed I Rise is for anyone interested in a very personal, human view of the history of World War II. A mother's attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness.
Hank Bracker
#73. Although most Americans believed in Manifest Destiny, few could agree on exactly which lands the United States was supposed to govern.
Charles W. Carey Jr.
#74. But also out here in this dreary, difficult war, I think history will record that this may have been one of Americas finest hours, because we took a difficult task and we succeeded.
Richard M. Nixon
#75. A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.
Arthur Miller
#76. When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen
Frederick L. Coxen
#77. The War on Terror is one of the most critical national security efforts in our history.
Sue Kelly
#78. Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
Anne Michaels
#79. It is good that war is so terrible, or we should become too fond of it
Robert E. Lee
Greg Seeley
#80. (P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.
Ralph Raico
#81. For the first time in history, we declared war without financing it. Americans have not been asked to pay for it through taxes.
David Broder
#82. History is full of examples of slaughter and victory.
Bobby Adair
#83. Combat is fast, unfair, cruel, and dirty. It is meant to be that way so that the terrible experience is branded into the memory of those who are fortunate enough to survive. It is up to those survivors to ensure that the experience is recorded and passed along to those who just might want to try it.
Bruce H. Norton
#84. Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.
Timothy Garton Ash
#85. The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.
Bruce Catton
#86. History more often records the brilliant successes and spectacular defeats of contending forces than the effect of war on the common people.
Mildred Cable
#87. There is no glory in war, yet from the blackness of its history, there emerge vivid colours of human character and courage. Those who risked their lives to help their friends.
Silvia Cartwright
#88. They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere." "Which is why you can't go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening," said Enoch. "History heals itself. Isn't that interesting?
Ransom Riggs
#89. There's never been a war in the history of the world that wasn't started by the wealthy for the wealthy
Deborah Smith
#90. The only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitors that the danger of war arises.
Richard M. Nixon
#91. Path To War was the last thing that John Frankenheimer directed, I think, before he died. I'm a huge U.S. history buff, and I studied the Vietnam era in college, so when I read the script, I was, like, "I really want to be in this thing so badly ... "
Peter Jacobson
#92. History books are filled with lies. Whoever wins the war tells the story.
Stephanie Perkins
#93. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.
Gordon Brown
#94. The way history is currently taught in schools, jumping from Hitler to the Henrys, is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars, where you have episode four before you have episode one. The sense of going on a journey of chronology and continuity, is incredibly important to the imagination.
Simon Schama
#95. Dunkirk has fallen ... with it has ended the greatest battle of world history. Soldiers! My confidence in you knew no bounds. You have not disappointed me.
Adolf Hitler
#96. The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin
about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;
Andrei Cherny
#97. Whoever thinks war allows for lasting victories should take a look at European history books and learn their lesson.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
#98. Destroying Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder this country has made in its history. Unless we change course, there's every reason to believe the Iraq War will end up changing the United States more than it will ever change Iraq.
Robert Baer
#99. Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.
Joe Baca
#100. Religion has failed us. Christ was not a Christian. Buddha was not a Buddhist. Mohammed was not a Mohammedan. And yet ever since the dawn of history, we have engaged in conflict and war and terrorism and murder and racism and ethnocentrism and bigotry and prejudice in the name of God.
Deepak Chopra
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