Top 100 War That Quotes
#1. Firefly: Now that you're Secretary of War, what kind of an army do you think we oughta have? Chicolini: Well, I tell you what I think. I think we should have a standing army. Firefly: Why should we have a standing army? Chicolini: Because then we save money on chairs.
Groucho Marx
#2. To me, every fundamentalist Muslim, no matter how peaceable in his own behavior, is part of a murderous movement and is thus, in some fashion, a foot soldier in the war that bin Laden has launched against civilization.
Daniel Pipes
#3. War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them
all they want.
William T. Sherman
#4. Since the outbreak of war, there has been in our country a steady increase in the consumption of spirits, wine and beer. It is estimated that in dollar volume, the annual outlay is now practically double what it was before the war.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
#5. I knew right then and there that I would become as courageous as I needed in order to keep him safe. I thought of the soldiers and bullets that I hid from in Asmara. I would stand and fight them to keep Fili safe.
Abeba Habtu
#6. Humans don't leap buildings. Stuntmen with harnesses do. And won't my crashing eight stories to the ground be detrimental to the mission? The dark elves will swarm me and take me hostage instantly."
"That might be true, but you're not going to fall," he said.
Amanda Carlson
#7. The only war that we must all fight is the one against evil.
Pope Francis
#8. Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.
George Orwell
#9. So I ask the nuclear powers to abandon the out-of-date thinking of the Cold War period and take a fresh look. Above all, I appeal to them to bear in mind the long-term threat that nuclear weapons pose to humankind and to begin action towards their elimination.
Joseph Rotblat
#10. Each returning soldier is an in-the-flesh memoir of war. Their chapters might vary, but similar imagery fills the pages, and the theme of every book is the same
profound change. The big question became, could I live with that kind of change?
Ellen Hopkins
#11. Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.
Arthur Hertzberg
#12. 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
#13. If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.
Arlen Specter
#14. 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
#15. I'm not always a positive person. I wake up grumpy, I read the newspaper and I get furious that the world is still at war.
Jason Mraz
#16. I love you," he said against her lips. "I love you, too," she said but the words that always seemed so big felt small now. What was love when put up against war?
Kristin Hannah
#17. We are a country that has many friends, many allies, when we operate in the world, we operate with friends and allies that's been true for decades and if we wind up going to war in Iraq it will be true in Iraq.
Douglas Feith
#18. If you listen closely to the voices of our veterans, you understand that yes, they all returned from war changed, but what never changed is this: They never forgot your generosity. They never forgot the power of opportunity. They never forgot the American dream.
Michael Mullen
#19. As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.
Asne Seierstad
#20. Scripture indicates that deception, false religions, and apostasy lead to war, and that war in turn leads to famine and pestilence.
Billy Graham
#21. Actual places, landscapes that exist[ed] simultaneously in both physical and metaphysical space ... true geographical refugia, verdant valleys dominated by protective mountain deities where people could seek solace as lonely pilgrims, or flee violence as a community in time of war.
Wade Davis
#22. When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.
Herbert Hoover
#23. 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
#24. I've been giving free money seminars for the troops at Walter Reed Hospital and one of the Iraqi War Vets realized that the military wouldn't pay for the dental work he needed.
Matthew Lesko
#25. Among the many interesting objects which will engage your attention that of providing for the common defense will merit particular regard. To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
George Washington
#26. The State practices "violence," the individual must not do so. The state's behavior is violence, and it calls its violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime".
Max Stirner
#27. I think it is now widely understood that the so-called "War on Drugs" has largely been a failure. Too many people have developed criminal records for smoking marijuana. Too many people have gone to jail for nonviolent crimes. So I think it's important for us to rethink the war on drugs.
Bernie Sanders
#28. The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.
Bruce Catton
#29. Blood mixture and the result drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.
Adolf Hitler
#30. There is a widespread understanding among the people of this nation, and probably among the people of the world, that there is no safety except through the prevention of war.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#31. The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.
Bob Simon
#32. Some people think that nothing moves in this world without leave of the woman. Do not know more, but I can say that war never happened, nor can there be, when you do not want to leave sovereign
Jose De Alencar
#33. He was a graduate of West Point, which is military academy that turns young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. 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
#36. On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Andrew Dalby
#37. We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.
A.J. Muste
#38. In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.
Ron Paul
#39. 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
#40. I found that I was getting a warm reception for my message of freeing you from the income tax, releasing you from Social Security, ending the insane war on drugs, restoring gun rights, and reducing the federal government to just its constitutional functions.
Harry Browne
#41. I crawled in a spirit-haunted place
Made wild by souls that moan and mourn;
And Death leered by with mangled face -
Ah God! I prayed, I prayed for dawn.
Arthur Newberry 1893- Choyce
#42. 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
#43. Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#44. That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans.
Scott Ritter
#45. In this room we understand why this war might be fought ... it's about our common belief that no one has the right to tell two creatures that they cannot love each other
no matter what their species.
Deborah Harkness
#46. No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings.
Kelly Link
#47. Secretary [John] Kerry has called Civil War [in Syria] an unbelievably small war that we're going to get involved with.
Rand Paul
#48. Each one of these treaties is a step for the maintenance of peace, an additional guarantee against war. It is through such machinery that the disputes between nations will be settled and war prevented.
Frank B. Kellogg
#49. Germany, because of the fact and the perception of a special relationship with Russia, is the only one who can influence Russian debate. Russians also believe that Germans understand them best because they've been through a big war and know what humiliation means.
Ivan Krastev
#50. Studio press agents make up anything they want to, and reporters go along with it. One flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery. If it is a 'bionic face,' why didn't they do a better job of it?
Jack Palance
#51. It must be instilled in man that 'peace' is the best legacy we would leave behind for the generations to come, as we practice and follow the edicts of human rights.
Henrietta Newton Martin
#52. China invaded India, and there was a war between India and China in some of the disputed terrain in 1962, and India got hurt by that.
Wesley Clark
#53. We must believe that He permits it [this war] for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with ourlimited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe, that he who made the world still governs it.
Abraham Lincoln
#54. Now this brings me to my main topic - our military strength - more specifically, how to stay strong against threat from outside, without undermining the economic health that supports our security.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#55. One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
Sebastian Junger
#56. Rachel kneeled beside Jacob. She took the child's hand and pressed it to the dirt. Her father had told Rachel that Harmons had been on this land since before the Revolutionary War.
"Don't ever forget what it feels like, Jacob," she whispered, and let her hand touch the ground as well.
Ron Rash
#57. Our country since its inception has been at war, every 15 or 20 years. But the war that we are fighting against radical Islamist jihadists is one that we must win. Our very existence is dependent upon that.
Benjamin Carson
#58. You can't come away with this cosmic perspective thinking that you are better than others and want to fight. That's why you'll never have astrophysicists leading nations into war.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#59. I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.
Eugene Cernan
#60. It's odd that the people who worry whether certain plays are "morally offensive" so rarely worry about the moral offensiveness of war, poverty, bigotry.
Sydney J. Harris
#61. Avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward.
Hans Rosling
#62. One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
Paul Wolfowitz
#63. The Islamic terror threat is so fierce, unrelenting and barbaric that we tell ourselves fairy tales about how these ruthless acts are anything but what they are: acts of war.
Monica Crowley
#64. The closest thing I could think of that men go through is like a prisoner of war being tortured, and then coming back from that experience. It's traumatic and grounding and makes you commit to the world. Also, because you want all of these things for your kid.
Larkin Grimm
#65. 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
#66. When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.
Philippa Gregory
#67. For us who are now in power, we need to be challenged to serve the people and ignore our own egos and personal interests so that we can really demonstrate to other African states that it is possible to share power without going to war.
Wangari Maathai
#68. It is the object only of war that makes it honorable.
Thomas Paine
#69. There's a saying, 'Death hath a thousand doors to let out life; I shall find one.' But the children. That's what I struggle with.' He shook his head. 'Why the children?
Ruta Sepetys
#70. Unfortunately, we have warring in the world, so the youngest minds, the brilliant minds, are sent off to war. I think that, you know, you have brilliant people with great possibilities and that's why I really am not really for war. I really am not.
Stevie Wonder
#71. The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the 'battlefield' is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited 'battlefield.'
Glenn Greenwald
#72. President Bush admitted that the United States went to war in Iraq based on bad intelligence. But he says knowing what we know now he would still do it again. So at least we're learning from our mistakes.
Jay Leno
#73. Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.
Blaise Pascal
#74. Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Robert Graves
#75. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.
Steven Pinker
#76. Marriage is like war - an experience that no adventurous man would evade, and no sensible man repeat.
Ursula Parrott
#77. You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.
Tim O'Brien
#78. The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#79. It is notorious that, whenever the demand for labor is much greater than the supply, or the wages of labor are much higher than the expenses of living, very many, even on the ordinary laboring class, are remarkable for indolence, and work no more than compelled by necessity.
Edmund Ruffin
#80. I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war.
Norman Finkelstein
#81. In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.
George Clooney
#82. Now that the war is winding down, I want to say I do appreciate you fellows hanging around here - just for me.
Bob Hope
#83. In 'Sisters of War,' I got to do one of my own stunts. Running out of the building because the Japanese were firing, with all these little spark plugs are going off, looking like explosions and bullets flying down. That was really fun.
Sarah Snook
#84. That level of trade deficit throttles real growth in our country and continues the unfortunate path of selling out America. We are not winning the global trade war, we are losing it badly.
Marcy Kaptur
#85. May I just single out for salutations, on the 'anti-war' side: Pop Stars For Appeasement, Dancers Against Democracy, Actors For Apathy, Fashionistas For Fascism and Jugglers For Genocide. All of them united under that flaccid flag of convenience, Show-Offs For Saddam.
Julie Burchill
#86. There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws ... What is the difference between the two? ... An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#87. This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.
Karl Marlantes
#88. A barracks is meant to be a place where real soldiers were to be fed and equipped for war, not a place to settle down in or as a comfortable snuggery in which to enjoy ourselves. I hope that if ever they, our soldiers, do settle down God will burn their barracks over their heads!
Catherine Booth
#89. Here I stand on the brink of war again, a citizen of no place, no time, no country but my own ... and that a land lapped by no sea but blood, bordered only by the outlines of a face long-loved.
Diana Gabaldon
#90. Mammoth organizations, these ponderous processes. Many people don't realize that the nuclear capability that this country [USA] amassed and maintained over the period of the Cold War cost $6 trillion .
George Lee Butler
#91. From a scientific perspective there is some indication that a nuclear war could deplete the earth's ozone layer or, less likely, could bring on a new Ice Age - but there is no suggestion that either the created order or mankind would be destroyed in the process.
Herman Kahn
#92. Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.
Eugene B. Sledge
#93. War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.
Sebastian Junger
#94. There were strange noises in the room, great bellowing sobs that did not sound like anything human. They bounced off the wals, echoing in her ears. Stop! she wanted to cry at the person who was making the noise. Then she realised that it was her.
Kate Williams
#95. 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
#96. The only thing you can be sure of, Herr March, is that - whoever wins - still standing when the smoke of battle clears will be the banks of the cantons of Switzerland.
Robert Harris
#97. I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.
Barack Obama
#98. Go back," he said.
"Can't. Stand aside?"
"Can't."
"So it's like that?" I said.
Fix exhaled. Then he nodded. "Yeah."
And for the first time in a decade the Winter Knight and Summer Knight went to war.
Jim Butcher
#99. In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
Marquis De Sade
#100. The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.
William Ellery Channing
