War In History Quotes

#1. I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

Abba Eban

#2. Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces.

Merrill McPeak

#3. Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War.

Stephen V Monsma

#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. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

Randall Wallace

#16. 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

#17. [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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

Jon Meacham

#23. Our union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.

James Buchanan

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. '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

#28. '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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. In Britain, these Jewish refugees were greeted with a mixture of grudging acceptance by some and open hostility by others.

Thomas Harding

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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.

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. The War on Terror is one of the most critical national security efforts in our history.

Sue Kelly

#48. (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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. There's never been a war in the history of the world that wasn't started by the wealthy for the wealthy

Deborah Smith

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.

Bob Woodward

#61. There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.

Robert M. T. Hunter

#62. It must now atone in blood for its complicity in wickedness.

Abraham Lincoln

#63. 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

#64. The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.

Mao Zedong

#65. I think a lot of Civil War stuff is written - As they say, history is written by the victors. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this from a purely dramatic perspective is whether someone is right or wrong, you understand where they're coming from in this.

Josh Radnor

#66. Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

Stephen Ambrose

#67. This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#68. I can recall no parallel in history where a great nation recently at war has so distinguished its former enemy commander.

Douglas MacArthur

#69. The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from the community. Colonization usurps any free role in either war or peace, every decision contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.

Albert Memmi

#70. While the framers of the United States Constitution were ashamed of slavery and used euphemisms in place of the term "slave", the authors of the Confederate Constitution proudly used the term no less than ten times.

C.L. Gammon

#71. Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.

Simon Schama

#72. The Annual Register for 1763 tabulated the casualty list for British sailors in the Seven Years' War with France. Out of 184,899 men raised or rounded up for the war, 133, 708 died from disease, primarily scurvy, while only 1,512 were killed in action.

Stephen R. Brown

#73. As long as the same passions and interests subsist among mankind, the questions of war and peace, of justice and policy, which were debated in the councils of antiquity, will frequently present themselves as the subject of modern deliberation.

Edward Gibbon

#74. All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.

Victor Cousin

#75. The history of the failure of war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

Douglas MacArthur

#76. U dare to threaten me?she retaliated, gaining her feet as she faced off with the Enforcer in what had to be the most unwise action in Council history since the decision to go to war with the Druids.

Jacquelyn Frank

#77. When has there ever been a government in German history that came to the people and revealed its detailed plans for the coming years? That could not happen before, since German governments planned war and conquest.

Walter Ulbricht

#78. But Clara's father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#79. The wars of Israel were the only 'holy wars' in history ... there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#80. Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves.

Vasily Grossman

#81. As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#82. Probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese. Emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened.

Allen Nevins

#83. Rapid change of conditions in all human affairs bring unexpected results.

William C. Oates

#84. The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II, just as the world was beginning to learn the full horrors of history's worst genocide, the Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews and 3 million others in Europe.

Linda Chavez

#85. I thought of Pericles' speech to the families of the Athenian war dead, in which he said, What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.

Eric Greitens

#86. A secret history of the US Government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a safe haven in the US for Nazis and their collaborators after WW2 and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

James Morcan

#87. True holy war in human history has ceased because Jesus has fought its last episode on the cross.

Karen H. Jobes

#88. Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.

Charles Krauthammer

#89. During the conflict that was placed before them, they not only gained the gratitude of many in their own generation but they proved, for the first time on a global scale, the enormous value of a woman's contribution, paving the way for future generations of women to do the same.

Kathryn J. Atwood

#90. We didn't have an indigenous Taliban before 2008. We didn't have a war in Swat before 2008, we didn't have a war in Waziristan. We never, in our 63-year history, we have never allowed unmanned Predator drones from ANY country to fly over our skies and kill our citizens.

Fatima Bhutto

#91. Throughout the history of the United States , war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance.

Bruce D. Porter

#92. Is it more important for you to know what happened in the First World War or to memorize other significant dates in history, or is it more important to learn the strategies they used for optimum leadership, success and joyful living?
Don't you think schools need to teach the latter?

Maddy Malhotra

#93. Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Sarah Vowell

#94. If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction..

Joseph Goebbels

#95. This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

Adolf Hitler

#96. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.

Ray Bradbury

#97. The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to
be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

Paul Fussell

#98. The achievements of Labour in the years after the Second World War should never be underestimated, but they are now history.

Bob Crow

#99. Like many people who live in the South, I'm drawn to the history of the Civil War.

Nicholas Sparks

#100. And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.

James Hilton