Top 100 War Life Quotes
#1. The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.
Theodor Adorno
#2. Love, war, life was a series of battlefields strung together with the courage to march forward.
Elise Kova
#3. It's a curse - this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.
Margaret Mitchell
#4. After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
Chinua Achebe
#5. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and
Will Durant
#6. War is only a passing phase in business life ... If you want my opinion there's nothing like a spot of patriotism for blinding people to reality.
J.G. Farrell
#7. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#8. As if goaded by a kind of frantic despair, I sketched these dirty, ragged little victims of the war with their bruised, lacerated minds and bodies, their matted hair and runny noses. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.
Walter Keane
#9. Men who have been in war have a different attitude about being wronged.
Dan Groat
#12. Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.
Ernest Hemingway,
#13. The casualties of war are true heroes that everybody forgets to remember, even those who fight wars within themselves ...
Michelle Horst
#14. 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
#15. Fear had an anatomy. A curious thought. It had genitals, a bladder and bowls. That was where you felt fear. Not in your head. It was between your legs. It affected your excretion. It emptied you. It turned your bowls to water. It is disgusting.
Stuart Cloete
#16. Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches.
Simran Keshwani
#17. As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how "gallant" it is for a man to "shed his blood for his country," and "to give his life's blood as a sacrifice," and so on. The words seemed ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.
Eugene B. Sledge
#18. In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.
Ishmael Beah
#19. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?
Margaret Atwood
#20. We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.
Laura Hillenbrand
#21. Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.
Randy Thornhorn
#22. It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.
Tiffany Madison
#23. I've come to accept that parts of life are constant, that just because something happens on two different days doesn't make it a goddamn miracle.
Kevin Powers
#24. In an area of more than 1,000 war graves and with birdsong as the only sound, I contemplated the thin margin between life and death. If the sniper's bullet had been just two feet to one side, my father's life would have been over, aged just 27, and I would never have been born.
Michael Ashcroft
#25. It's an old and honored tradition for war heroes to be promoted to important offices, whether or not they're suited to it
Christie Golden
#26. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that if the United States continued to kill life at its beginnings with abortion, at its mid-day with the handicapped, and at twilight with euthanasia, it would lead to the catastrophic midnight of nuclear war.
Kelly Bowring
#27. Today, the stranglehold of the controlling negative forces upon Earth is extremely advanced and is choking the very life from our planet. The effects of this are evident everywhere in the form of fear, separation, war, disease and multifarious kinds of disharmony on all levels.
David Icke
#28. All I know, is that I feel extremely blessed to be on TV. It's a hard job, but real life is harder. Truth be told, playgrounds can be war zones.
Atticus Shaffer
#29. Mankind must give up war in the Atomic Era. What is at stake is the life or death of humanity.
Albert Einstein
#30. The real working class, though they hate war and are immune to jingoism, are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it.
George Orwell
#31. If you aren't preparing for life like a war, you'll end up living like a prisoner of war.
Sharad Vivek Sagar
#32. That paper
it sits there, open at the employment section. It sits there like a war, and each small advertisement is another trench for a person to dive into. To hope and fight in.
Markus Zusak
#33. A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#34. I love you more than life itself, Arodi, you mean everything to me. I'm lost without you. I swear by all that is holy and sacred to me that I will never leave you, and I won't die on you. I'm never going to leave you alone.
C.N. Faust
#35. The allure of military life and its heroic promise seem indestructible, but nothing threatens the romance of war more effectively than war itself.
Elizabeth Samet
#36. War is not just the business of death, it is the antitheses of life.
Joss Whedon
#37. You haven't lived a full life until you have been in a very tough situation when you thought you were going to die. War does that to you.
William E. Peterson
#38. War is an initiation into the power of life and death. Women touch that power on the moment of birth, men at the edge of death.
William Broyles Jr.
#39. This is the soldier brave enough to tellThe glory-dazzled world that "war is hell":Lover of peace, he looks beyond the strife,And rides through hell to save his country's life.
Henry Van Dyke
#41. And where there are shadows, there is light, Liebchen.
J.W. Horton
#42. What Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical to the notion of leading a heroic life.
Scott Anderson
#43. 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
#44. The desire to win a war is expensive, but the desire to win with wisdom is wise.
Debasish Mridha
#45. This life is ironic: for it takes pain to discover pleasure; it takes sadness to know happiness; it takes war to value peace; and it takes hatred to treasure love.
[Culled from: "Amara & The Strange Elderly Woman"]
Emmanuel Aghado
#46. How dare you come into my home? And hurt my family? I ought to tear your throat out right here, right now!
S.R. Crawford
#47. Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Plato
#48. Only the brave men and women can bring peace to the world, not by practicing war but by practicing nonviolence.
Amit Ray
#49. The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.
Sloane Crosley
#51. This is the beginning of the end (talking about the war) ... Everyone was saying ... But the British Prime Minister said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Do you see the difference?
Anne Frank
#52. To other women the choice of clothes was a form of ingenious exhibition, a shameless seduction. To me, dresses were like a breastplate that I put on to set off to war against this life.
Shan Sa
#53. Of course people don't want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Hermann Goring
#55. George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'.
Gideon Haigh
#56. I wonder why peopke are so afraid of love. Of different kinds of love. I just don't get it. Why aren't we afraid of racism Of war? But love? It just doesn't make sense.
Gail Sidonie Sobat
#57. Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.
Nam June Paik
#58. That's not a bad word ... hate and war are bad words, but fuck isn't.
Judy Blume
#59. I read in 'Life' magazine that Asians had developed an operation to enlarge eyes, and I yearned to have this done. I wanted to dye my hair brown and to anglicize my name. Self-hate was the most terrible cost of the war years for me.
David Suzuki
#60. And I know just's well as anybody that if you control a man's space and time then you control his whole goddamn life: he's a goner, cause hell, there ain't nothin' for him to do in space and time but make the few choices he can make with what he got.
Nicholas Hochstedler
#61. God has placed in each soul an apostle to lead us upon the illumined path. Yet many seek life from without, unaware that is within them.
Khalil Gibran
#62. [The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.
Sir Laurens Van Der Post
#63. Honor from death," I snap, "is a myth. Invented by the war torn to make sense of the horrific. If we die, it will be so that others may live. Truly honorable death, the only honorable death, is one that enables life.
Rae Carson
#64. What with our hooks, snares, nets, and dogs, we are at war with all living creatures, and nothing comes amiss but that which is either too cheap or too common; and all this is to gratify a fantastical palate.
Seneca The Younger
#65. Philip Jones Griffith documented the Vietnam War, and through his images that were published in Time Life Magazine, it showed me the horrors of war and at that time, I wanted to be a war photographer, based off his work.
Jamel Shabazz
#66. What was it like? Hell if I know. But next time someone asks.... I'll answer crooked, and I'll answer long. And when they get confused or angry, I'll smile. Finally, I'll think. Someone who understands.
Matt Gallagher
#67. Everywhere that we looked, were objects & artifacts reminiscent of a bygone age. of war & destruction, of mankind's determination to rule his neighbour, to prove how mighty he and his people are, yet a romance of days past that I am drawn to like a soul lost and hearing his lovers cries to him
Rob Shepherd
#68. [WASHINGTON]
It's alright, you want to fight, you've got a hunger
I was just like you when I was younger
Head full of fantasies of dyin' like a martyr?
[HAMILTON]
Yes
[WASHINGTON]
Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder
Lin-Manuel Miranda
#69. I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war.
Ben Barnes
#70. Everything of the body is a river. Everything of the soul is dream and vapour. Life is war and the abode of a stranger. The only fame after death is oblivion.
Marcus Aurelius
#71. There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.
Bernard Cornwell
#72. Let me have two locks of your hair, and help my mother plait them into a bow-string for me. "Does anything depend on it asked Hallgerd". "My life depends on it replied Gunnar.
Anonymous
#73. War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T. S. Eliot
#74. It was not, Zelda wrote, prosperity or the softness of life, or any instability that marred the war generation; it was a great emotional disappointment resulting from the fact that life moved in poetic gestures when they were younger and had since settled back into buffoonery.
Nancy Milford
#75. No mother ever wants a war, they want to see their children grow up in peace, surrounded by love.
Debasish Mridha
#76. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.
John F. Kerry
#77. Until the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, until then Israel didn't have a chance but to fight for her life. We were attacked five times, outgunned, outnumbered, on a small piece of land, and our main challenge was to remain alive.
Shimon Peres
#78. But, hey, remember: If things don't work out in your life, you can always just turn to drugs or join the Army.
Jason Christopher Hartley
#79. Pro football is a game; not a war. It's for win or lose, not life or death ... but say that in the summer, for winter brings the playoffs, and a season is at stake.
John Facenda
#80. What Elzy had learned in the war was this: Sometimes your life depended upon having to do an awful thing, and the only way to make it through was to just do it and feel the sorrow later. - 'Elzy Taylor and the Men from the City by Jesse Knifley
Frank Larnerd
#81. The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.
Craig Venter
#82. During the war, there were people wishing me death, wishing my son death, wishing my wife death in very graphic ways. In the past, I would go overseas and I would say, "Israel is like my family: we disagree, but we're all brothers." I can't say that anymore, because life proves me wrong.
Etgar Keret
#83. War had rearranged my priorities. I now clung to memories more than goals or material things. But there were a few irreplaceable items that buoyed my spirit and fight for life. It was at that moment that I realized. Something was missing from my suitcase.
Ruta Sepetys
#85. The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
Adrienne Rich
#86. We need a total renunciation of war. We must renounce war totally, because now we can destroy all life on earth.
Benjamin Creme
#87. They are heroes, our soldiers, the men and women who go into harm's way to protect us, our way of life. It doesn't matter what you think of the war, your have to be grateful to the warriors, of whom we ask so much. To whom we sometimes give too little.
Kristin Hannah
#88. In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
Winston S. Churchill
#89. If the war had taught Charlie one lesson, it was that killing accomplished only death.
Joy Preble
#90. Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life.
Elena Ferrante
#91. There are good points about all ... wars. People forget self. The virtues of magnanimity, courage, patriotism, etc., are called into life. People are more generous, more sympathetic, better, than when engaged in the more selfish pursuits of peace.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#92. Anything that says Yes to life is automatically saying No to war.
Tom Robbins
#93. In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life-one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough.
Bill Moyers
#94. But just as soon as this war's over and finished with,I'll get back home and marry her.I've grown up with her, Joey, known her all my life. S'pose I know her almost as well as I know myself, and I like her a lot better.
Michael Morpurgo
#95. This world is so full of wars and hostilities.
All parties seek for allies to defeat enemies.
I support peace effort towards mastermind
which has caused men hostile to each other.
Toba Beta
#96. Just like all people - just want to get on with their lives, and have families, and have a bit of fun and have a decent life. They are not interested in war - no one is, unless you are a professional soldier. Or a politician! And then of course it's your living!
Gerald Scarfe
#97. Be resolved that honor is heavier than the mountains and death lighter than the feather.
Yasuo Kuwahara
#98. The world after a war is a good world, I told myself. A happy world. A secure world. In this world, I might do anything.
Jennifer Niven
#99. It is you men who make war! ... We, who have children, would never make it! Why should a woman be broken up in pain, to give her child life, only to see him carried away from her, to make food for guns?
Phyllis Bottome
#100. Let us assume that the ideal were reached; let us imagine a state of international life in which the danger of war no longer exists. Then no one would dare to demand a penny for obviously completely superfluous armaments.
Ludwig Quidde
