War Leader Quotes

#1. We became convinced that, regardless of Stalin's awful brutality and his reign of terror, he was a great war leader. Without Stalin, they never would have held.

W. Averell Harriman

#2. A poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilization and its raging opposite.

Adam Nicolson

#3. The consummate leader cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is in his power to control success.

Sun Tzu

#4. Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.

Aristotle.

#5. Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.

John Steinbeck

#6. Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side. Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#7. There is one ray of hope. It seems to me that today the responsible leaders of the several peoples have, in the main, the honest will to abolish war.

Albert Einstein

#8. The more a leader is in the habit of demanding from his men, the surer he will be that his demands will be answered.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#9. We got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.

George W. Bush

#10. We have to go massively, like we did in the first Gulf War where we destroyed Saddam's ability to take Kuwait. We need to have a coalition that will stand for nothing less than the total destruction of ISIS and we have to be the leader.

John Kasich

#11. Conflicts often stem from a couple of leaders on both sides that are badly brought up. They'd rather go to war than compromise. And in business, you're competing with other companies all the time, but you don't end up going to war with each other.

Richard Branson

#12. To an old leader will be born an idiot heir, weak both in knowledge and in war.

Nostradamus

#13. All it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a ...

Hermann Goring

#14. Well," he said at last, "if you guys elect me leader, you must be even crazier than I am. So let's build a spankin' hot war machine!

Rick Riordan

#15. As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.

Samantha Power

#16. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war.

George Orwell

#17. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

George Orwell

#18. American socialism had lost momentum even before the war. (Socialist leader Norman Thomas received 885,000 votes in his 1932 run for the presidency, but only 187,500 in 1936.)

Benjamin Balint

#19. We should demonstrate that in war, under Churchill and Lloyd George, and in peace, Britain always was, already is, and can continue to be a leader.

Gordon Brown

#20. The culture war is between the winners and those who think they're losers who want to become winners. The losers think the only way they can become winners is by banding together all the losers and them empowering a leader of the losers to make things right for them.

Rush Limbaugh

#21. Charlotte's face paled. She was already scared as a prisoner of war. Now she knew where she had been taken. She was in the Draco Galaxy. The galaxy controlled by Dunge Katorsay. The leader of the intergalactic rebellion.

Kenneth S. Murray

#22. In a pre-scientific society the best the common man can do is pin his faith on a leader and give him his support, trusting in his benevolence against the misuse of the delegated power and in his wisdom to govern justly and make war successfully.

B.F. Skinner

#23. The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses.

John Le Carre

#24. Nothing binds a people to their leader like a common enemy. Voters don't change governments during war.

Harvey Fierstein

#25. When the leaders speak of peace, the common folk know war is coming.

Bertolt Brecht

#26. The world is near escalating to World War Three and where are the leaders of each religion? Why aren't they having a conclave; why aren't they coming together?

Elton John

#27. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold.

Stephen Cohen

#28. The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader's freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship.

Steven Pinker

#29. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.

Ronald Kessler

#30. I had been a guerrilla leader in World War II. And I used to say that the way to fight the guerrilla was with guerrillas. And I disbelieved that you could by bombing, ah, have any effect on the supplies coming down through the Ho Chi Minh trails.

Roger Hilsman

#31. Isn't it strange how the leaders of nations can talk so eloquently about peace while they prepare for war? ... There is no way to make peace while preparing for war.

Coretta Scott King

#32. Gates should have exceeded Washington as a military leader. He had long experience in a professional army and was more loved by his men. But Washington's character was superior to that of his rival, and it made him a great man, whereas Gates was merely a good soldier.

John Ferling

#33. To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years.

Margaret Thatcher

#34. You do not follow me because I am the strongest. Pax is. You do not follow me because I am the brightest. Mustang is. You follow me because you do not know where you are going. I do.

Pierce Brown

#35. Any team that has Shade as their leader is bound to have a pretty directionless quality. But when Cyborg asks Shade to gather the Secret Seven together and help him stop the war between Wonder Woman and Aquaman, Shade agrees - albeit reluctantly.

Peter Milligan

#36. The logic of war seems to be if the belligerent can fight, he will fight. That leaders will not surrender until surrender is academic. How is a national leader to explain the sacrifice of so much for nothing?

Thomas Powers

#37. Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.

Michael Ventura

#38. Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.

Pat Buchanan

#39. But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair.

Rory Bremner

#40. It's a thin line between what we're calling acceptable and not acceptable. As a leader, you're supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you? No.

David Finkel

#41. Future U.S. political leaders, those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me, may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost.

Robert M. Gates

#42. We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it ... No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.

Robert H. Jackson

#43. Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics.

Tom Peters

#44. A sovereign should never launch an army out of anger, a leader should never start a war out of wrath

Sun Tzu

#45. When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

Plato

#46. That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.

Shimon Peres

#47. I am not going to leave this land, I will die as a martyr at the end ... I shall remain, defiant. Muammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time.

Muammar Gaddafi

#48. Not only the priceless heritage of our fathers, of our seamen, of our Empire builders is being thrown away in a war that serves no British interests - but our alliance leader Stalin dreams of nothing but the destruction of that heritage of our fathers?

John Amery

#49. All I am, and all I love, is war. I don't know who I will be if I stop. The world, if it is to survive, needs a leader, not a warmonger. The world I want to make does not require me

Kameron Hurley

#50. Our profession is built on the bedrock of trust - the trust that must inherently exist among Soldiers, and between Soldiers and their leaders to accomplish their mission in the chaos of war. Recent incidents of sexual assault and sexual harassment demonstrate that we have violated that trust.

Raymond T. Odierno

#51. If 'pleasing the people' is the only criterion (of a 'big' leader), then going to war or pretending to go to war or simulating outrage and bad mouthing states you can do nothing about, is the playbook for you.

Khaled Ahmed

#52. Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor.

William Shakespeare

#53. Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning.

Otto Von Bismarck

#54. Men spoke of tribal war, of a gathering of vultures in the southeast, and a terrible leader who led his swiftly increasing hordes to victory.

Robert E. Howard

#55. Bush may be a strong leader in the war on terrorism, but on budget deficits he is missing-in-action.

Jim Cooper

#56. The leader must be an actor.

George S. Patton

#57. Does the commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' mean nothing to us? Are we to interpret it as meaning 'Thou shalt not kill except on the grand scale,' or 'Thou shalt not kill except when the national leaders say to do so'?

Linus Pauling

#58. There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a Democrat like myself must admit this.

Theodore Roosevelt

#59. History shows that it takes only a spark to start a fire that cannot be easily checked. The Seven Stages of War started with the outrage of one leader.

Joelle Charbonneau

#60. We want accountability. We just buried a president [President Gerald Ford] who did not hold another president [President Nixon] accountable for war crimes and that's why we're in Iraq right now. Our leaders who get us into these messes are the ones who need to be held accountable.

Cindy Sheehan

#61. What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

Henry A. Kissinger

#62. The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting.

Sun Tzu

#63. We cannot proclaim this century the African Century and then ignore the AIDS pandemic, as some political leaders are apt to do. To claim this century the African Century is to declare war on AIDS.

Nelson Mandela

#64. Reasons are the spoils of victory. When you've destroyed the enemy, then your leaders write down the reasons in books, and give moving speeches about them. If you've done your job, then there aren't any of the enemy left to dispute your leader's reasons. At least not until the next war.

Terry Goodkind