War, a grim tapestry woven from the threads of human ambition and despair, plunges nations into chaos, sears hearts with loss, and stains the earth with spilled blood. It is a merciless dance of devastation, where progress stumbles and hope dims beneath the shadow of bombs. Yet, even amidst the wreckage, flicker embers of courage and compassion, testaments to the enduring spirit that yearns to weave a brighter future from the ashes of conflict.
War Quotes
1. “All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
— George Orwell
2. “for the dictatorships, it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.”
— Harry Emerson Fosdick
3. “There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.”
— Abraham Lincoln
4. “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”
— George S. Patton
5. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
— Plato
6. “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
— Abraham Lincoln
7. “Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”
— Hermann Goring
8. “Swift as the wind. Quiet as the forest. Conquer like the fire. Steady as the mountain.”
— Sun Tzu
9. “Politics is almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.”
— Winston Churchill
10. “In war, truth is the first casualty.”
— Aeschylus
11. “We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.”
— Jeane Kirkpatrick
12. “War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”
— Bertrand Russell
13. “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
— Albert Einstein
14. “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.”
— Tacitus
15. “There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.”
— George Washington
16. “The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.”
— Ludwig von Mises
17. “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
— George Orwell
18. “We are advocates of the abolition of war; we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war.”
— Mao Zedong
19. “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.”
— Frank Herbert
20. “Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
21. “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
22. “War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
23. “It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own.”
— H. G. Wells
24. “Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”
— Ronald Reagan
25. “An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.”
— Baron de Montesquieu
26. “Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.”
— John F. Kennedy
27. “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
— James Madison
28. “Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.”
— Ronald Reagan
29. “War is the only game in which both sides lose.”
— Walter Scott
30. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
— Albert Einstein
31. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
— Sun Tzu
32. “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
— Thomas Paine
33. “I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
— George McGovern
34. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
— Albert Camus
35. “If we don’t end war, war will end us.”
— H. G. Wells
36. “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”
— Otto von Bismarck
37. “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”
— George Orwell
38. “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
39. “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
40. “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
— Howard Zinn
41. “I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.”
— Abbie Hoffman
42. “War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.”
— Alfred Adler
43. “Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”
— Sigmund Freud
44. “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
— James Madison
45. “Providence is always on the side of the last reserve.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
46. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
47. “War is the business of barbarians.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
48. “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
49. “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
— Albert Camus
50. “Wars are the hobbies of half-informed children who have somehow come into possession of the levers of power.”
— Fred Reed
51. “War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.”
— Martin Luther
52. “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to “war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”
— Winston Churchill
53. “Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later.”
— Benjamin Franklin
54. “Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
— James Madison
55. “War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.”
— Albert Pike
56. “What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”
— Aldous Huxley
57. “We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
— Jimmy Carter
58. “Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals?”
— Mahatma Gandhi
59. “History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”
— Ronald Reagan
60. “Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?”
— Norman Cousins
61. “War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.”
— Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
62. “No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”
— Ernest Hemingway
63. “Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn’t have as many monuments to unveil.”
— Kin Hubbard
64. “The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.”
— David Hume
65. “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”
— Thomas Jefferson
66. “A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”
— Thomas Jefferson
67. “Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.”
— Thomas Jefferson
68. “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
69. “It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
70. “No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.”
— Henry A. Kissinger
71. “The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.”
— Arthur Koestler
72. “It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.”
— Douglas MacArthur
73. “Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.”
— Douglas MacArthur
74. “It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”
— James Madison
75. “War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.”
— James Madison
76. “Inflict not on an enemy every injury in your power, for he may afterward become your friend.”
— Saadi
77. “Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.”
— Ludwig von Mises
78. “To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.”
— Ludwig von Mises
79. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow
80. “War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.”
— George Orwell
81. “O war! Thou son of Hell!”
— William Shakespeare
82. “All quiet along the Potomac they say Except now and then a stray picket Is shot as he walks on his beat, to and fro, By a rifleman hid in the thicket.”
— Ethel Lynn Beers
83. “Gaily! gaily! close our ranks! Arm! Advance! Hope for France! Gaily! gaily! closed our ranks! Onward! Onward! Gauls and Franks!”
— Pierre-Jean de Beranger
84. “The chance of war Is equal, and the slayer oft is slain.”
— Homer
85. “The waves of the mysterious death river moaned; The tramp, the shout, the fearful thunder-roar Of red-breathed cannon, and the wailing cry Of myriad victims, filled the air.”
— George D. Prentice
86. “War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.”
— Woodrow Wilson
87. “He who first called money the sinews of the state seem to have said this with special reference to war.”
— Plutarch
88. “O great corrector of enormous times, Shaker of over-rank states, thou grand decider of dusty and old titles, that healest with blood The earth when it is sick, and curest the world O” the pleurisy of people.”
— John Fletcher
89. “What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
90. “Take thou thy arms and come with me,
“Take thou thy arms and come with me,
For we must quit ourselves like men, and strive
To air our cause, although we be but two.
Great is the strength of feeble arms combined,
And we can combat even with the brave.”
— Homer
91. “Everything changed in Bosnia when General Wesley Clark proved that you could fight a war with high-level precision air strikes and a bare minimum of ground action.”
— Joe Bob Briggs
92. “I am going to fight – I, a socialist and Syndicalist – so that we shall make an end to war, so that the little ones of France will sleep in peace, and the women go without fear.”
— Philip Gibbs
93. “Enforcement is the long overdue step to protect our Nation from external threats in a time of war. And then once we do that, we can effectively discuss a guest worker program.”
— J. D. Hayworth
94. “After the war, prompted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, I entered Parliament so that a priest could speak out for the poor, as canon law at that time still permitted.”
— Abbe Pierre
95. “When the red wrath perished when the dulled swords fail, These three who have walked with Death these shall prevail. Hell bade all its millions rise; Paradise sends three: Pity, Self-sacrifice, and Charity.”
— Theodosia Garrison
96. “Wars based on principle are far more destructive… the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.”
— Alan Watts
97. “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”
— John F. Kennedy
98. “Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”
— Abraham Lincoln
99. “The savage in man is never quite eradicated.”
— Henry David Thoreau
100. “The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.”
— Ludwig von Mises
101. “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
— Abba Eban
102. “A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.”
— Sigmund Freud
103. “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”
— Alexander the Great
104. “We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.”
— Benjamin Harrison
105. “Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.”
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
106. “Wars are caused by undefended wealth.”
— Ernest Hemingway
107. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
— Thomas Jefferson
108. “Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.”
— Thomas Jefferson
109. “Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: “War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.”
— Immanuel Kant
110. “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
— Nelson Mandela
111. “The essence of so-called war prosperity: it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.”
— Ludwig von Mises
112. “If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”
— Thomas Jefferson
113. “The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.”
— Friedrich von Bernhardi
114. “You can have all the advanced war methods you want, but, after all, nobody has ever invented a war that you don’t have to have somebody in the guise of soldiers to stop the bullets.”
— Will Rogers
115. “War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.”
— Winston Churchill
116. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
— C. S. Lewis
117. “As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.”
— Albert Einstein
118. “Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out… and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel… And in the intervals between campaigns, he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man with his mouth.”
— Mark Twain
119. “We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
120. “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
— Thomas Paine
121. “A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.”
— Winston Churchill
122. “The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.”
— Ron Paul
123. “It is not right to exult over slain men.”
— Homer
124. “Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
125. “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.”
— George Washington
126. “He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
127. “In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.”
— Julius Caesar
128. “There should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.”
— Jimmy Carter
129. “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and goodwill.”
— Neville Chamberlain
130. “You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.”
— Noam Chomsky
131. “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
— Winston Churchill
132. “The more laws, the less justice.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
133. “The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.”
— Ramsey Clark
134. “From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.”
— Denis Diderot
135. “The war… was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forbearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.”
— Robert E. Lee
136. “I can make more generals, but horses cost money.”
— Abraham Lincoln
137. “All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”
— John Locke
138. “Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
— Martin Luther
139. “Nothing good ever comes of violence.”
— Martin Luther
140. “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
— Rosa Luxemburg
141. “Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
142. “For whoever conquers a free Town, and does not demolish it, commits a great Error, and may expect to be ruin “d himself.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
143. “Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.”
— Groucho Marx
144. “In war, the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.”
— H. L. Mencken
145. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”
— John Stuart Mill
146. “The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”
— Ludwig von Mises
147. “To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.”
— Thomas Paine
148. “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
— George S. Patton
149. “Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.”
— Will Rogers
150. “To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”
— Tacitus
151. “Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.”
— Peter Ustinov
152. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
— Nathan Hale
153. “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
— George Washington
154. “You can’t say civilization doesn’t advance… in every war, they kill you in a new way.”
— Will Rogers
155. “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is; the sooner it will be over.”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
156. “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
— Hermann Goring
157. “Only the dead have seen the end of the war.”
— George Santayana
158. “The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities.”
— Mark Twain
159. “The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.”
— Edward Abbey
160. “I must study politics and war so that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”
— John Adams
161. “Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.”
— Alfred Adler
162. “I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.”
— Edmund Burke
163. “A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
164. “Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.”
— Salvador Dali
165. “War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.”
— Benjamin Disraeli
166. “There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.”
— Thomas A. Edison
167. “Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.”
— Thomas Jefferson
168. “I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.”
— Thomas Jefferson
169. “One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
170. “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.”
— Ludwig von Mises
171. “The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.”
— Lester B. Pearson
172. “No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.”
— Ronald Reagan
173. “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president… is morally treasonable to the American public.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
174. “Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
175. “By push of bayonets, no firing until you see the whites in their eyes!”
— Andrew Agnew
176. “Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education… no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.”
— Abraham Flexner
177. “Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than War.”
— John Milton
178. “The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.”
— Leo Tolstoy
179. “To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.”
— Voltaire
180. “If any Question why We Died Tell them because our Father’s Lied.”
— Rudyard Kipling
181. “I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.”
— Sheryl Crow
182. “The British Army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.”
— Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
183. “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”
— Sun Tzu
184. “It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used.”
— Sun Tzu
185. “The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.”
— Sun Tzu
186. “The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.”
— Sun Tzu
187. “Too frequent rewards indicate that the general is at the end of his resources; too frequent punishments that he is in acute distress.”
— Sun Tzu
188. “Secret operations are essential in war; upon them, the army relies to make its every move.”
— Sun Tzu
189. “What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins but excels in winning with ease.”
— Sun Tzu
190. “No one conquers who doesn’t fight.”
— Gabriel Biel
191. “Good order and discipline in any army are to be depended upon more than courage alone.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
192. “A man can die but once.”
— William Shakespeare
193. “Let anyone who has zeal for God come with me! Let us fight for our brothers! Let Heaven’s will be done!”
— Conrad III of Germany
194. “The strength of God will enable us, a small but faithful band, to overcome the multitude of the faithless.”
— Robert Guiscard
195. “A safe stronghold our God is still. A trusty shield and weapon.”
— Martin Luther
196. “To whom God will, there be the victory.”
— William Shakespeare
197. “Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them.”
— William Shakespeare
198. “We are ready to try our fortunes to the last man.”
— William Shakespeare
199. “To ensure victory the troops must have confidence in themselves as well as in their commanders.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
200. “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”
— Abraham Lincoln
201. “I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations.”
— Douglas MacArthur
202. “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.”
— James Madison
203. “We shall then defeat the whole lot of them in one go!”
— Edward I of England
204. “…to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
205. “I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it.”
— Will Rogers
206. “Speed is the essence of war.”
— Conor McGregor
207. “It’s easy to fight when everything’s right and you’re mad with the thrill and the glory; It’s easy to cheer when victory’s near, And wallow in fields that are gory. It’s a different song when everything’s wrong When you’re feeling infernally mortal; When it’s ten against one, and hope there is none, Buck up, little soldier, and chortle!”
— Robert W. Service
208. “It is the good war that hallows every cause.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
209. “Even war is preferable to a shameful peace.”
— Tacitus
210. “Tis a principle of war that when you can use the lightning, “tis better than cannon.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
211. “Always open all gates and roads to your enemies, and rather make for them a bridge of silver, to get rid of them.”
— Francois Rabelais
212. “War! war! war!
Heaven aid the right!
God moves the hero’s arm in the fearful fight!
God sent the women to sleep in the long, long night,
When the breasts on whose strength they leaned shall have no more.”
— Edmund Clarence Stedman
213. “War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with. … But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.”
— Friedrich von Bernhardi
214. “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all.”
— Faramir
215. “War is elevating, because the individual disappears before the great conception of the state… What a perversion of morality to wish to abolish heroism among men!”
— Heinrich von Treitschke
216. “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
— Noam Chomsky
217. “No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.”
— Ernest Hemingway
218. “There’s many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but it is all hell.”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
219. “Force always attracts men of low morality.”
— Albert Einstein
220. “If they wish to fight today, let them come like men.”
— Bohemond I of Antioch
221. “In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory.”
— Douglas MacArthur
222. “When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of its momentum. When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing.”
— Sun Tzu
223. “Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace.”
— Charles Sumner
224. “The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable; and let it come! I repeat, Sir, let it come!”
— Patrick Henry
225. “He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
226. “It is not an army that we must train for war; it is a nation.”
— Woodrow Wilson
227. “The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.”
— John F. Kennedy
228. “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
— Mahatma Gandhi
229. “Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
230. “One does not create a human society on mounds of corpses.”
— Louis Lecoin
231. “War is the mother of everything.”
— Heraclitus
232. “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
— James Madison
233. “Battles are sometimes won by generals; wars are nearly always won by sergeants and privates.”
— F. E. Adcock
234. “Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole of good intentions which miscarry or are frustrated. It is made not usually by evil men knowing themselves to be wrong, but is the outcome of policies pursued by good men usually passionately convinced that they are right.”
— Norman Angell
235. “In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.”
— Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
236. “The common excuse for those bringing misfortune on others is that they desire their good.”
— Luc de Clapiers
237. “Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sacred into crows” meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three grouches?”
— Thomas Carlyle
238. “My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.”
— Henry Ford
239. “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
— Wilfred Owen
240. “Whoever devotedly undertakes and performs this most holy journey… shall have the enjoyment of eternal reward from the repair of all men.”
— Pope Eugene III
241. “It is the merit of a general to impart good news, and to conceal the truth.”
— Sophocles
242. “A mind at peace does not engender wars.”
— Sophocles
243. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
— Abraham Lincoln
244. “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some, the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name – liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.”
— Abraham Lincoln
245. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.”
— Abraham Lincoln
246. “**** the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”
— David Farragut
247. “Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!”
— Alexander Blok
248. “There’s nothing good in war. Except its ending.”
— Abraham Lincoln
249. “The brazen throat of war.”
— John Milton
250. “No war or battle sound Was heard the world around.”
— John Milton
251. “Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost.”
— Walt Whitman
252. “Our business in the field of fight, is not to question, but to prove our might.”
— Alexander Pope
253. “My subject is war, and the pity of war.”
— Wilfred Owen
254. “In war, as in love, we must come into contact before we triumph.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
255. “Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to that with all my heart, But civilization does get forbid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.”
— James Russell Lowell
256. “The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.”
— Ludwig von Mises
257. “Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.”
— Ludwig von Mises
258. “As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.”
— Omar N. Bradley
259. “I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.”
— Joseph Heller
260. “History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents…. A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.”
— Ludwig von Mises
261. “A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.”
— Ludwig von Mises
262. “Never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.”
— Winston Churchill
263. “Peace and not war is the father of all things.”
— Ludwig von Mises
264. “When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest…and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war.”
— Plato
265. “War is the father of all things.”
— Heraclitus
266. “Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.”
— Jonathan Swift
267. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
— Julia Ward Howe
268. “War makes rattling good history.”
— Thomas Hardy
269. “Hold the fort! I am coming!”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
270. “For what can war, but endless war, still breed?”
— John Milton
271. “Men like war: they do not hold much sway over birth, so they make up for it with death. Unlike women, men menstruate by shedding other people’s blood.”
— Lucy Ellmann
272. “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
— Abraham Lincoln
273. “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”
— Horatio Nelson
274. “In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.”
— Douglas MacArthur
275. “Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.”
— Khalil Gibran
276. “War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
277. “War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
278. “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”
— Jose Narosky
279. “Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.”
— James Bryce
280. “The world has never been as divided as it is now, what with religious wars, genocides, a lack of respect for the planet, economic crisis, depression, poverty, with everyone wanting instant solutions to at least some of the world’s problems or their own. And things only look bleaker as we head into future.”
— Paulo Coelho
281. “War makes thieves and peace hangs them.”
— George Herbert
282. “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
— Samuel P. Huntington
283. “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.”
— Aesop
284. “In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign… Secondly, a just cause… Thirdly… a rightful intention.”
— Thomas Aquinas
285. “The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.”
— Omar N. Bradley
286. “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
287. “The sinews of war are infinite money.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
288. “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”
— Clarence Darrow
289. “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
290. “I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.”
— Ernest Hemingway
291. “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
— Thomas Hobbes
292. “Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.”
— Thomas Jefferson
293. “The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.”
— Thomas Jefferson
294. “We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
295. “The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”
— Robert Wilson Lynd
296. “l know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.”
— Douglas MacArthur
297. “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
— James Madison
298. “The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”
— James Madison
299. “Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.”
— Ron Paul
300. “A people free to choose will always choose peace.”
— Ronald Reagan
301. “Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”
— Donald Rumsfeld
302. “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
303. “The next war… may well bury Western civilization forever.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
304. “Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.”
— Madame de Stael
305. “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
— Sun Tzu
306. “During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.”
— Howard Thurman
307. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
308. “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”
— George Washington
309. “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”
— George Washington
310. “No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
— George Lucas
311. “Accurst be he that first invented war.”
— Christopher Marlowe
312. “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”
— Duke of Wellington
313. “War is the trade of kings.”
— John Dryden
314. “For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
— Sun Tzu
315. “Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.”
— Sun Tzu
316. “Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible.”
— A. Philip Randolph
317. “A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.”
— Benjamin Franklin
318. “It is not only the living who are killed in war.”
— Isaac Asimov
319. “War…is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.”
— Ludwig von Mises
320. “If we don’t stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.”
— Pat Buchanan
321. “Having seen the people of all other nations bowed down to the earth under the wars and prodigalities of their rulers, I have cherished their opposites, peace, economy, and riddance of public debt, believing that these were the high road to public as well as private prosperity and happiness.”
— Thomas Jefferson
322. “Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”
— Sun Tzu
323. “A rational army would run away.”
— Baron de Montesquieu
324. “All delays are dangerous in war.”
— John Dryden
325. “In the eyes of empire builder’s men are not men but instruments.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
326. “To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
327. “Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.”
— Guy de Maupassant
328. “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”
— Sun Tzu
329. “Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile.”
— Pope John Paul II
330. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
331. “John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.”
— Isaac Asimov
332. “When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”
— Winston Churchill
333. “All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.”
— Francois Fenelon
334. “When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?”
— Benjamin Franklin
335. “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
— Patrick Henry
336. “Everything, everything in war is barbaric… But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.”
— Ellen Key
337. “No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
338. “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”
— Barbara Tuchman
339. “The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.”
— E. B. White
340. “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
341. “As far as I’m concerned, war always means failure.”
— Jacques Chirac
342. “War is the greatest plague that can afflict mankind… Any scourge is preferable to it.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
343. “Ares (The God of War) hates those who hesitate.”
— Euripides
344. “The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
345. “One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”
— Agatha Christie
346. “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”
— George Orwell
347. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
348. “I don’t believe in war as a solution to any kind of conflict, nor do I believe in heroism on the battlefield because I have never seen any.”
— Thor Heyerdahl
349. “A tyrant… is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”
— Plato
350. “There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.”
— Golda Meir
351. “My voice is still for war.”
— Joseph Addison
352. “This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
353. “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
354. “The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.”
— George McGovern
355. “I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses.”
— Harry Emerson Fosdick
356. “War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
— Smedley Butler
357. “War is what happens when language fails.”
— Margaret Atwood
358. “The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.”
— Ambrose Bierce
359. “My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.”
— Smedley Butler
360. “We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.”
— Albert Camus
361. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
— Winston Churchill
362. “No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war.”
— Calvin Coolidge
363. “We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom. And now, as in no other age, we seek it because we have been warned, by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
364. “To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.”
— George Santayana
365. “The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
366. “My first wish is, to see this plague of mankind banished from the earth, and the sons and daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements, than in preparing implements, and exercising them, for the destruction of mankind.”
— George Washington
367. “The god of war hates those who hesitate.”
— George S. Patton
368. “When children’s children shall talk of War as a madness that may not be; When we thank our God for our grief today, and blazon from sea to sea in the name of the Dead the banner of Peace … that will be Victory.”
— Robert W. Service
369. “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”
— John Steinbeck
370. “War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”
— Winston Churchill
371. “When you see contention amongst your enemies, go and sit at ease with your friends; but when you see them of one mind, string your bow, and place stones upon the ramparts.”
— Saadi
372. “What a cruel thing war is… to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”
— Robert E. Lee
373. “Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples.”
— Pope Francis
374. “Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.”
— Ayn Rand
375. “The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.”
— Desiderius Erasmus
376. “All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.”
— Benjamin Franklin
377. “War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.”
— Napoleon Hill
378. “War…is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.”
— Thomas Jefferson
379. “For some years I have spent my time on exactly these questions – both in thinking about ways to prevent war, and in thinking about how to fight, survive, and terminate a war, should it occur.”
— Herman Kahn
380. “All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?”
— Benjamin Franklin
381. “I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment – and yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second of it.”
— Winston Churchill
382. “But what a cruel thing is war to separate and destroy families and friends.”
— Robert E. Lee
383. “War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.”
— Norman Cousins
384. “Putting aside all the fancy words and academic doubletalk, the basic reason for having a military is to do two jobs -to kill people and to destroy.”
— Thomas S. Power
385. “War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.”
— Desiderius Erasmus
386. “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.”
— Albert Einstein
387. “Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.”
— Eduardo Galeano
388. “I don’t know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace is an interlude during war.”
— Georges Clemenceau
389. “There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.”
— Michel de Montaigne
390. “It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.”
— Albert J. Nock
391. “Let the boy win his spurs.”
— Edward III of England
392. “The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”
— Hugo Black
393. “The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
394. “I have not yet begun to fight!”
— John Paul Jones
395. “God has chosen little nations as the vessels by which He carries His choicest wines to the lips of humanity to rejoice their hearts, to exalt their vision, to strengthen their faith, and if we had stood by when two little nations [Belgium and Serbia] were being crushed and broken by the brutal hands of barbarians, our shame would have rung down the everlasting ages.”
— David Lloyd George
396. “In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.”
— Ernest Hemingway
397. “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.”
— Oscar Wilde
398. “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
399. “If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
400. “War remains the decisive human failure.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
401. “I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.”
— Jim Garrison
402. “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
— John F. Kennedy
403. “War is a defeat for humanity.”
— Pope John Paul II
404. “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
405. “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
406. “It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.”
— Murray Rothbard
407. “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.”
— George Washington
408. “He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
— Albert Einstein
409. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
— John Milton
410. “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
— Abraham Lincoln
411. “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”
— Smedley Butler
412. “War’s tragedy is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.”
— Harry Emerson Fosdick
413. “Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.”
— Abraham Lincoln
414. “What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
415. “An aggressive war is a great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.”
— Ernest Hemingway
416. “War determines not who is right but who is left.”
— Sidney Greenberg
417. “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.”
— Nathan Bedford Forrest
418. “A just war is in the long run far better for a man’s soul than the most prosperous peace.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
419. “American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century’s major wars. In the First World War, 5 percent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 percent, while in a Third World War 90-95 percent would be civilians.”
— Colin Ward
420. “The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.”
— Patrick Henry
421. “The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”
— Aldous Huxley
422. “War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.”
— Colin Powell
423. “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road.”
— George W. Bush
424. “The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters – not to talk in armies and nations and numbers – but to track it home.”
— D. H. Lawrence
425. “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.”
— Sun Tzu
426. “What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.”
— Robert E. Lee
427. “As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”
— Edward Gibbon
428. “No more wars, no more bloodshed. Peace unto you. Shalom, salaam, forever.”
— Menachem Begin
429. “It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
— Albert Einstein
430. “Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
— George Orwell
431. “War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.”
— Karl Kraus
432. “War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.”
— Frank Herbert
433. “Success in battle is not a function of how many show up, but who they are.”
— Robert H. Barrow
434. “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
435. “Fortune is always on the side of the largest battalions.”
— Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne
436. “War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.”
— Desiderius Erasmus
437. “England expects that every man will do his duty.”
— Horatio Nelson
438. “All war is deception.”
— Sun Tzu
439. “Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or world destruction.”
— Bernard Baruch
440. “Tyrants seldom want pretexts.”
— Edmund Burke
441. “Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.”
— George W. Bush
442. “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.”
— Albert Camus
443. “The only defensible war is a war of defense.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
444. “There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
445. “The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.”
— David Friedman
446. “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.”
— Ulysses S. Grant
447. “The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson
448. “People do not make wars; governments do.”
— Ronald Reagan
449. “That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true.”
— Thomas Paine
450. “War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.”
— Charles Evans Hughes
451. “Boys are the cash of war.”
— John Ciardi
452. “War hath no fury like a non-combatant.”
— Charles Edward Montague
453. “Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.”
— Harry Elmer Barnes
454. “War is never economically beneficial except for those in a position to profit from war expenditures.”
— Ron Paul
455. “Good order makes men bold, and confusion, cowards.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
456. “It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.”
— John F. Kennedy
457. “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”
— Thomas Jefferson
458. “How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.”
— Albert Einstein
459. “Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men.”
— Pope John Paul II
460. “War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.”
— Alexander Berkman
461. “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!”
— William Shakespeare
462. “No one is so foolish as to prefer to peace, war, in which, instead of sons burying their fathers, fathers bury their sons.”
— Croesus
463. “We come here with no peaceful intent, but ready for battle, determined to avenge our wrongs and set our country free.”
— William Wallace
464. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”
— John Stuart Mill
465. “An army abroad is of little use unless there are prudent counsels at home.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
466. “When “tis an even thing in th” prayin”, may th” best man win … an” th” best man will win.”
— Finley Peter Dunne
467. “To overcome in battle, and subdue Nations, and bring home spoils with infinite Man-slaughter, shall be held the highest pitch of human glory.”
— John Milton
468. “When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
469. “Ye living soldiers of the mighty war,
Once more from roaring cannon and the drums
And bugles blown at morn, the summons comes;
Forget the halting limb, each wound and scar:
Once more your Captain calls to you;
Come to his last review!”
— Richard Watson Gilder
470. “I’ll fight, till from my bones my flesh be hacked.”
— William Shakespeare
471. “War’s a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.”
— William Cowper
472. “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
— Albert Einstein
473. “It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.”
— Andre Gide
474. “I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.”
— Thomas Jefferson
475. “We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
476. “We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
477. “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
— Winston Churchill
478. “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
— George Orwell
479. “Governments constantly choose between telling lies and fighting wars, with the end result always being the same. One will always lead to the other.”
— Thomas Jefferson
480. “War would end if the dead could return.”
— Stanley Baldwin
481. “There was never a good war, or a bad peace.”
— Benjamin Franklin
482. “There never was a good war or a bad revolution.”
— Edward Abbey
483. “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
484. “Charges of cavalry are equally useful at the beginning, the middle and the end of a battle. They should be made always, if possible, on the flanks of the infantry, especially when the latter is engaged in front.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
485. “War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”
— Howard Zinn
486. “The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
487. “Laws are silent in time of war.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
488. “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror.”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
489. “The military don’t start wars. Politicians start wars.”
— William Westmoreland
490. “Ye who made war that your ships Should lay to at the back of no nation, make war now on Murder, that slips The leash of her hounds of damnation; Ye who remembered the Alamo, Remember the Maine!”
— Richard Hovey
491. “An unjust peace is better than a just war.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
492. “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”
— George Orwell
493. “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.”
— George Orwell
494. “Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
495. “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.”
— George W. Bush
496. “And it is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.”
— Herbert Hoover
497. “It’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up front with you, I like brawling.”
— James Mattis
498. “All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”
— Tony Benn
499. “Do you know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?”
— Pope Julius III
500. “If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
501. “He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”
— Albert Einstein
502. “War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.”
— H. L. Mencken
503. “There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.”
— Benjamin Franklin
504. “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
— Ernest Hemingway
505. “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.”
— Omar N. Bradley
506. “Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.”
— Herbert Hoover
507. “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”
— Robert E. Lee
508. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
— Sun Tzu
509. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
— Winston Churchill
510. “With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a “smart bomb,” it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered “just,” because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary.”
— Howard Zinn
511. “We shall not surrender.”
— Hugh
512. “More than just an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
513. “You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
514. “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
— James A. Baldwin
515. “Peace – the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.”
— Javier Perez de Cuellar
516. “In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the consequences should war occur despite our efforts to avoid it.”
— Herman Kahn
517. “You’ve got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you’re going to hit civilians.”
— Barry Goldwater
518. “Beware the toils of war … the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.”
— Homer
519. “There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.”
— George Bernard Shaw
520. “Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.”
— Euripides
521. “I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: “Mother, what was war?”
— Eve Merriam
522. “I have seen war … I hate war.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
523. “If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.”
— Ludwig von Mises
524. “War is the gambling table of governments, and citizens the dupes of the game.”
— Thomas Paine
525. “Either war is obsolete, or men are.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
526. “All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons.”
— Dalai Lama
527. “Now that I’ve seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: “And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?” I wouldn’t know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.”
— Cesare Pavese
528. “The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
— Mark Twain
529. “… the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.”
— Robert Parry
530. “Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them … they may be forced to die by them.”
— Dan Simmons
531. “Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.”
— Herbert Hoover
532. “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”
— Robert E. Lee
533. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
— Sun Tzu
534. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
— Winston Churchill
535. “With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a “smart bomb,” it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered “just,” because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary.”
— Howard Zinn
536. “We shall not surrender.”
— Hugh
537. “More than just an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
538. “You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
539. “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
— James A. Baldwin
540. “Peace – the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.”
— Javier Perez de Cuellar
541. “You’ve got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you’re going to hit civilians.”
— Barry Goldwater
542. “Beware the toils of war … the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.”
— Homer
543. “There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.”
— George Bernard Shaw
544. “Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.”
— Euripides
545. “I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: “Mother, what was war?”
— Eve Merriam
546. “I have seen war … I hate war.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
547. “If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.”
— Ludwig von Mises
548. “War is the gambling table of governments, and citizens the dupes of the game.”
— Thomas Paine
549. “Either war is obsolete, or men are.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
550. “All forms of violence, especially war, are totally unacceptable as means to settle disputes between and among nations, groups and persons.”
— Dalai Lama
551. “Now that I’ve seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: “And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?” I wouldn’t know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only the dead know, and only for them is the war really over.”
— Cesare Pavese
552. “The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
— Mark Twain
553. “… the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.”
— Robert Parry
554. “Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them … they may be forced to die by them.”
— Dan Simmons
555. “Say it isn’t true
That there always has been and always will be war
Say it isn’t true
And apart from all the fine things that man has struggled for
Say it isn’t true
There always has been and always will be war”
— Jackson Browne
556. “In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.”
— Sun Tzu
557. “I met someone from the German side and we both shared the same opinion: we fought, we finished and we were friends… It wasn’t worth it.”
— Harry Patch
558. “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
— John Quincy Adams
559. “It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.”
— Alfred Adler
560. “Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.”
— Francis Bacon
561. “Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.”
— Bernard Baruch
562. “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
— Ambrose Bierce
563. “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
— Louis D. Brandeis
564. “The Imperial German Government will not expect the Government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.”
— William Jennings Bryan
565. “The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.”
— Taylor Caldwell
566. “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.”
— Thomas Carlyle
567. “To some degree, it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.”
— Noam Chomsky
568. “When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.”
— Winston Churchill
569. “That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.”
— Noel Coward
570. “The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.”
— John Foster Dulles
571. “Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”
— Edward Everett
572. “Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?”
— Oriana Fallaci
573. “I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It’s only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.”
— William Gibson
574. “I don’t underrate the value of military knowledge, but if men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.”
— Ulysses S. Grant
575. “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
— Ernest Hemingway
576. “Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.”
— A. E. Housman
577. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.”
— Thomas Jefferson
578. “We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.”
— Thomas Jefferson
579. “Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes… can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.”
— John F. Kennedy
580. “No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
581. “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”
— Groucho Marx
582. “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
— John Stuart Mill
583. “Men are fighting one another because they are convinced that the extermination and liquidation of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.”
— Ludwig von Mises
584. “Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.”
— Ludwig von Mises
585. “Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone, whether citizen or foreigner.”
— Ludwig von Mises
586. “War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.”
— Ludwig von Mises
587. “An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.”
— Thomas Paine
588. “Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.”
— Ronald Reagan
589. “Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.”
— Marquis de Sade
590. “What is more immoral than war?”
— Marquis de Sade
591. “Sometimes they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
— Carl Sandburg
592. “Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total… because it may well involve the whole world.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
593. “It is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well… than to kill ten thousand.”
— Olive Schreiner
594. “We first fought… in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.”
— Serj Tankian
595. “What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.”
— Henry David Thoreau
596. “We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.”
— Leo Tolstoy
597. “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
— Oscar Wilde
598. “World War II was the last government program that really worked.”
— George Will
599. “Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.”
— James Wolcott
600. “It’s one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.”
— James Wolcott
601. “I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.”
— William Butler Yeats
602. “One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.”
— Howard Zinn
603. “I think war is a dangerous place.”
— George W. Bush
604. “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. –as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS.”
— Abraham Lincoln
605. “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
— Jeannette Rankin
606. “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”
— Neville Chamberlain
607. “Fondly do we hope, ferverently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”
— Abraham Lincoln
608. “Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat – including men – from reluctant citizens.”
— Charles Tilly
609. “I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war…suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.”
— Philip Caputo
610. “Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it.”
— Anne O’Hare McCormick
611. “Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men.”
— George S. Patton
612. “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”
— Sun Tzu
613. “The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill.”
— Duke of Wellington
614. “Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.”
— Edmund Burke
615. “Every post is honorable in which a man can serve his country.”
— George Washington
616. “From hence, let fierce contending nations know, what dire effects from civil discord flow.”
— Joseph Addison
617. “Ben Battle was a soldier bold and used to war’s alarms, But a cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.”
— Thomas Hood
618. “Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy’s fate.”
— Sun Tzu
619. “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders are clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.”
— Sun Tzu
620. “If you do not leave this pasturage, Saladin will come and attack you here. And if you retreat from this attack the shame and reproach will be very great.”
— Gerard de Ridefort
621. “Every man should arm himself as quickly as he could, and come to the King.”
— Charles William Chadwick Oman
622. “O, thou hast damnable iteration; and art, indeed, able to corrupt a saint.”
— William Shakespeare
623. “There live not three good men unhanged in England; and one of them is fat and grows old.”
— William Shakespeare
624. “The sinews of war are not gold, but good soldiers.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
625. “Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
626. “And in this battle, Brother William (Guillaume), Master of the Templars, lost an eye; and he had lost the other on the previous Shrove Tuesday; and that Lord died as a consequence, may God absolve him! And you should know that there was at least an acre of land behind the Templars, which was so covered with arrows fired by the Saracens, that none of the ground could be seen.”
— Jean de Joinville
627. “The princes who have done great things are the ones who have taken little account of their promises.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
628. “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”
— William Shakespeare
629. “I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways.”
— William Shakespeare
630. “Put an end to so great an evil and arrive at a peace settlement whatever the outcome, and whatever the conditions.”
— William of Tyre
631. “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”
— Neville Chamberlain
632. “Fondly do we hope, ferverently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.”
— Abraham Lincoln
633. “Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat – including men – from reluctant citizens.”
— Charles Tilly
634. “I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war…suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.”
— Philip Caputo
635. “Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it.”
— Anne O’Hare McCormick
636. “Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men.”
— George S. Patton
637. “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”
— Sun Tzu
638. “The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill.”
— Duke of Wellington
639. “Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.”
— Edmund Burke
640. “Every post is honorable in which a man can serve his country.”
— George Washington
641. “From hence, let fierce contending nations know, what dire effects from civil discord flow.”
— Joseph Addison
642. “Ben Battle was a soldier bold, and used to war’s alarms, but a cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.”
— Thomas Hood
643. “Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy’s fate.”
— Sun Tzu
644. “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders are clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.”
— Sun Tzu
645. “If you do not leave this pasturage, Saladin will come and attack you here. And if you retreat from this attack the shame and reproach will be very great.”
— Gerard de Ridefort
646. “Every man should arm himself as quickly as he could, and come to the King.”
— Charles William Chadwick Oman
647. “O, thou hast damnable iteration; and art, indeed, able to corrupt a saint.”
— William Shakespeare
648. “There live not three good men unhanged in England; and one of them is fat and grows old.”
— William Shakespeare
649. “The sinews of war are not gold, but good soldiers.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
650. “Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
651. “And in this battle, Brother William (Guillaume), Master of the Templars, lost an eye; and he had lost the other on the previous Shrove Tuesday; and that Lord died as a consequence, may God absolve him! And you should know that there was at least an acre of land behind the Templars, which was so covered with arrows fired by the Saracens, that none of the ground could be seen.
— Jean de Joinville
652. “The princes who have done great things are the ones who have taken little account of their promises.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli
653. “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”
— William Shakespeare
654. “I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways.”
— William Shakespeare
655. “Put an end to so great an evil and arrive at a peace settlement whatever the outcome, and whatever the conditions.”
— William of Tyre
656. “Those who dare to interpret God’s will must never claim Him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.”
— Robert Runcie
657. “Let war yield to peace, laurels to paeans.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
658. “Laws are inoperative in war.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
659. “I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
660. “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”
— Sun Tzu
661. “If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight.”
— Sun Tzu
662. “It is the people who have no say in making wars who suffer from the consequences of them.”
— Jean Plaidy
663. “Nothing will end war unless the peoples themselves refuse to go to war.”
— Albert Einstein
664. “Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.”
— Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
665. “[Iraqis] know we own their country…It’s a good thing, especially when there is a lot of oil out there we need.”
— William R. Looney III
666. “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”
— John Fowles
667. “Cry “havoc!” and let loose the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial.”
— William Shakespeare
668. “War Is A Racket: I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.”
— Smedley Butler
669. “In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.”
— Thomas Paine
670. “Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.”
— Henry Ford
671. “After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.”
— Salman Rushdie
672. “It is interesting … how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.”
— Don DeLillo
673. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”
— Abraham Lincoln
674. “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.”
— Peter Sellers
675. “Come on soldiers! Guardians and agents of the supreme law! Here is a sacrifice of dogs ready for your swords!”
— Ilghazi
676. “I have brought you to the ring, now dance if you can!”
— William Wallace
677. “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.”
— Arnaud Amalric
678. “On both sides the troops were commanded by royal princes and they massacred each other mercilessly.”
— Matthew of Edessa
679. “The fighting was fierce and lasted for the greater part of a day; blood ran in rivers.”
— Matthew of Edessa
680. “One reason the United States finds itself at the edge of a foreign policy disaster is its underinformed citizenry, a key weakness in democracy.”
— Stefan Halper
681. “All wars are popular for the first 30 days.”
— Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
682. “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was”.”
— Abraham Lincoln
683. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
— Abraham Lincoln
684. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”
— Abraham Lincoln
685. “You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.”
— Albert Einstein
686. “War its thousands slay, Peace its ten thousand.”
— Beilby Porteus
687. “Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it.”
— George S. Patton
688. “He who did well in war just earns the right, to begin doing well in peace.”
— Robert Browning
689. “I war not with the dead.”
— Homer
690. “Ez fer war, I call it murder, – There you hev it plain a’ flat; I don’t want to go no furder Than my Testament fer that. . . . . . An’ you’ve gut to git up airly If you want to take in God.”
— James Russell Lowell
691. “We kind of thought Christ went again war and pillage.”
— James Russell Lowell
692. “My sentence is for open war.”
— John Milton
693. “It is magnificent, but it is not war.”
— Pierre Bosquet
694. “I feel sure that coups d’état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.”
— Edmond de Goncourt
695. “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
— Erich Maria Remarque
696. “We have to go along a road covered with blood. We have no other alternative. For us it is a matter of life or death, a matter of living or existing. We have to be ready to face the challenges that await us.”
— Gamal Abdel Nasser
697. “What boots it at one gate to make defense, And at another to let in the foe?”
— John Milton
698. “Ancestral voices prophesying war.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
699. “Artillery is more essential to cavalry than to infantry, because cavalry has no fire for its defense, but depends on the saber.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
700. “Those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.”
— Walter Cronkite
701. “All of us who served in one war or another know very well that all wars are the glory and the agony of the young.”
— Gerald R. Ford
702. “We don’t want wars even when we win.”
— Golda Meir
703. “Every shot has its commission, dye see? We must all die at one time, as the saying is.”
— Tobias Smollett
704. “Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.”
— Herman Kahn
705. “Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.”
— Robert Ardrey
706. “Lay down the axe; fling by the spade;
Leave in its track the toiling plough;
The rifle and the bayonet-blade
For arms like yours were fitter now;
And let the hands that ply the pen
Quit the light task, and learn to wield
The horseman”s crooked brand, and rein
The charger on the battlefield.”
— William C. Bryant
707. “The English took the eagle and Austrians the eaglet.”
— Victor Hugo
708. “The Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.”
— Woodrow Wilson
709. “I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.”
— Alan Bennett
710. “There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled the earth and air,
And set the stars in the infinite,
And made night gorgeous and morning fair;
And all that had sense to reason knew
That bloody drama must be gone through.
Some sat and watched how the action veered–
Waited, profited, trembled, cheered–
We saw not clearly nor understood,
But yielding ourselves to the master hand,
Each in his part as best he could,
We played it through as the author planned.”
— Alan Seeger
711. “Let war be so carried on that no other object may seem to be sought but the acquisition of peace.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
712. “Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.”
— John Adams
713. “I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.”
— George H. W. Bush
714. “There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.”
— Smedley Butler
715. “War is just a racket… I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.”
— Smedley Butler
716. “The Atomic Age is here to stay – but are we?”
— Bennett Cerf
717. “Politics is the womb in which war develops.”
— Carl von Clausewitz
718. “Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
719. “We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
720. “May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
721. “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
722. “God hates violence. He has ordained that all men fairly possess their property, not seize it.”
— Euripides
723. “Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.”
— E. M. Forster
724. “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.”
— Sigmund Freud
725. “Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.
— Daniel Goleman
726. “There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.”
— George Orwell
727. “War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.”
— Thomas Paine
728. “Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.”
— Ayn Rand
729. “There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.”
— Donald Rumsfeld
730. “Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
731. “What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?”
— Benjamin Spock
732. “At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords, we’re all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.
— Peter Ustinov
733. “It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
— Voltaire
734. “Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
— George Washington
735. “The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore, no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”
— George Washington
736. “What a country calls its vital… interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.”
— Simone Weil
737. “A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own.”
— H. G. Wells
738. “Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.”
— Rebecca West
739. “In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Good Will.”
— Winston Churchill
740. “War is fear cloaked in courage.”
— William Westmoreland
741. “No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.”
— Winston Churchill
742. “To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.”
— Sun Tzu
743. “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force…Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
— George Washington
744. “Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.”
— Ludwig von Mises
745. “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
746. “The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor.”
— Ronald Reagan
747. “The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”
— Winston Churchill
748. “A military operation involves deception. Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective.”
— Sun Tzu
749. “Studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of combat fatigue cases… found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure, and that fear of failure ran a strong second.”
— Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall
750. “We are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.”
— H. H. Asquith
751. “Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”
— Friedrich August von Hayek
752. “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
— Sun Tzu
753. “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
— Leo Tolstoy
754. “In every battle, there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.”
— Ulysses S. Grant
755. “Democracy is, in essence, a form of non-violent conflict management. If war is the worst enemy of development, healthy and balanced development is the best form of conflict prevention.”
— Kofi Annan
756. “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”
— George Carlin
757. “Whatsoever, therefore, is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such conditions there is no place for industry… no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
— Thomas Hobbes
758. “If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.”
— C. S. Lewis
759. “How is it possible to have a civil war?”
— George Carlin
760. “If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
761. “To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of national life.”
— Woodrow Wilson
762. “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
— Hiram Johnson
763. “Take up the weapons of the glorious army for the salvation of many thousands.”
— Adela of Normandy
764. “It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement.”
— Henry Ward Beecher
765. “A leader leads by example, not by force.”
— Sun Tzu
766. “We make war that we may live in peace.”
— Aristotle
767. “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
— Jimmy Carter
768. “There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.”
— Havelock Ellis
769. “The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory…but to keep the very structure of society intact.”
— George Orwell
770. “Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.”
— Havelock Ellis
771. “The control of a large force is the same principle as the control of a few men: it is merely a question of dividing up their numbers.”
— Sun Tzu
772. “War is an art and as such is not susceptible of explanation by a fixed formula.”
— George S. Patton
773. “In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.”
— Herodotus
774. “In war, only the simple succeeds.”
— Paul von Hindenburg
775. “Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely.”
— Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
776. “Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
777. “[War] can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.”
— John F. Kennedy
778. “Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momentary.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
779. “The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.”
— Thomas Jefferson
780. “War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
— Thomas Mann
781. “I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.”
— William Westmoreland
782. “The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.”
— John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher
783. “I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.”
— Giuseppe Garibaldi
784. “Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared.”
— Eddie Rickenbacker
785. “Resistance in Palestine will continue until the final liberation of all the Palestinian lands.”
— Ahmed Yassin
786. “I am a Soldier, I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight.”
— George S. Patton
787. “By peace, we mean the capacity to transform conflicts with empathy, without violence, and creatively- a never-ending process.”
— Johan Galtung
788. “They’re on our right, they’re on our left, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us; they can’t get away from us this time.”
— Chesty Puller
789. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”
— Chelsea Manning
790. “At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.”
— Stephen Ambrose
791. “Let’s not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.”
— Wesley Clark
792. “I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.”
— Eugene B. Sledge
793. “For the mission’s sake, our country’s sake, and the sake of the men who carried the Division’s colors in the past battles – who fought for life and never lost their nerve – carry out your mission and keep your honor clean. Demonstrate to the world there is “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy” than a U.S. Marine.”
— James Mattis
794. “We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day… Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.”
— Ilya Ehrenburg
795. “I would happily storm hell in the company of these troops … how strongly they have demonstrated to the world that free men and women can fight like the dickens.”
— James Mattis
796. “We are the only people on Earth asked to guarantee the security of our occupier…while Israel is the only country that calls for defense from its victims.”
— Hanan Ashrawi
797. “I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and sit down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I ain’t a going to kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks want to fight. Give them the guns.”
— Woody Guthrie
798. “It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. What happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans fled twice from the ghetto… My life’s dream has come true. Defense in the ghetto has become a fact. Armed Jewish resistance and revenge are actually happening. I have witnessed the glorious and heroic combat of the Jewish fighters.”
— Mordechai Anielewicz
799. “After each war, there is a little less democracy left to save.”
— Brooks Atkinson
800. “You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
801. “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
— Harrison Ford
802. “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
803. “Wars are not all evil, they are part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed.”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
804. “He who wants peace must prepare for war.”
— Claudius
805. “Barack Obama has done more than anyone else to promote the dangerous illusion that we can choose whether to have a war or not. But our enemies have already made that choice. Retired Marine Corps General James Mattis said: “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it’s over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote”.”
— Thomas Sowell
806. “If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?”
— Joan Baez
807. “Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.”
— Chris Hedges
808. “A top World War II ace once said that fighter pilots fall into two broad categories: those who go out to kill and those who, secretly, desperately, know they are going to get killed by hunters and the hunted.”
— Nathan Farragut Twining
809. “Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.”
— George Galloway
810. “How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?”
— Michael Ignatieff
811. “Some think that by preparing to deal with crises you make them more likely. I think the wiser judgment is the contrary. In this area at least, if you want peace or stability, it’s better to prepare for war or instability.”
— Timothy Geithner
812. “Our “neoconservatives” are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.”
— Edward Abbey
813. “To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.”
— Alfred Adler
814. “America and its allies are engaged in a war against a terrorist movement that spans all corners of the globe. It is sparked by radical ideologues that breed hatred, oppression, and violence against all of their declared enemies.”
— Kenny Marchant
815. “Can we please rename The Sandy Relief Bill to the Supplemental Iraq War Funding Bill so the GOP Congress can vote for it?”
— John Fugelsang
816. “War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.”
— Jacque Fresco
817. “Preemption is the right of any nation in order to preserve its National Security; however, preemptive war is a tactic, not a strategy. When used as a strategy preemption dilutes diplomacy, creates an atmosphere of distrust, and promotes regional instability.”
— Ellen Tauscher
818. “My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize.”
— Michael M. Honda
819. “Crime stories are our version of sitting around a campfire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That’s why there’s no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars.”
— Camilla Lackberg
820. “Every day women and children are killed and maimed by landmines long after wars are over.”
— Heather Mills
821. “It is in the union of the Ascending and the Descending currents that harmony is found, and not in any war between the two. It seems that only when the Ascending and the Descending are united can both be saved. And if we – if you and I – do not contribute to this union, then it is very possible that not only will we destroy the only Earth we have, we will forfeit the only heaven we might otherwise embrace.”
— Ken Wilber
822. “These two enormous forces – truth and meaning – are at war in today’s world… And something sooner or later has to give.”
— Ken Wilber
823. “All interstate wars intensify aggression – maximize it … some wars are even more unjust than others. In other words, all government wars are unjust, although some governments have less unjust claims.”
— Murray Rothbard
824. “It is inhuman to continue a war which could easily be ended.”
— Friedrich Durrenmatt
825. “The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a good murder; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes break on their editions.”
— Pete Hamill
826. “A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.”
— Murray Kempton
827. “War is very uncertain in its results, and often when affairs look most desperate they suddenly assume a more hopeful state.”
— George Meade
828. “Donald Westlake’s Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you’ve been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you’ll want on that desert island.”
— Lawrence Block
829. “Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were.”
— Tony Hillerman
830. “War is such a peculiar thing – inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is a difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning – even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops.”
— Errol Morris
831. “The civil war which has so long prevailed between Spain and the Provinces in South America still continues, without any prospect of its speedy termination.”
— James Monroe
832. “But at power or wealth, for the sake of which wars, and all kinds of strife, arise among mankind, we do not aim; we desire only our liberty, which no honorable man relinquishes but with his life.”
— Sallust
833. “The U.S. has perverted the U.N. weapons process by using it as a tool to justify military actions, falsely so. … The U.S. was using the inspection process as a trigger for war.”
— Scott Ritter
834. “I didn’t promote war when I was a weapons inspector.”
— Scott Ritter
835. “A state attacked by another which renews an old claim rarely yields it without a war: it prefers to defend its territory, as is always more honorable. But it may be advantageous to take the offensive, instead of awaiting the attack on the frontiers.”
— Antoine-Henri Jomini
836. “The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”
— Benjamin Rush
837. “Wars are indeed fought by children, by young people who have little to say in where they are sent to die.”
— Jeff Shaara
838. “The heroes of Flight 93 won the first battle in the War on Terror, and they should never be forgotten.”
— Jim Ramstad
839. “So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.”
— Malcolm Wallop
840. “War can’t end terrorism. War is terrorism.”
— Philip Berrigan
841. “Lying and war are always associated. Listen closely when you hear a war-maker try to defend his current war: If he moves his lips he’s lying.”
— Philip Berrigan
842. “The use of depleted uranium in the Gulf War has been particularly effective. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.” – HAROLD PINTER A $19 trillion price tag since 1940 for past, present, and future wars reveals our addiction to war and bloodshed.
— Philip Berrigan
843. “War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life.”
— A. J. Muste
844. “I saw clearly how those who saved the state so heroically and courageously in the War of Independence would be capable of bringing a catastrophe upon it if they are given the chance in normal times.”
— Moshe Sharett
845. “Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war.”
— Yitzhak Shamir
846. “It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.”
— George Santayana
847. “Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!”
— Georg Buchner
848. “You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.”
— R. Scott Bakker
849. “Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims.”
— Frank Chodorov
850. “More is spent in a single month [in the U.S.] fighting the war on drugs than all monies ever expended domestically or internationally fighting slavery from its inception. Per month, we spend more on the drug war than we ever have trying to free slaves.”
— Mira Sorvino
851. “I had wanted to make a film about World War II for some time, but I didn’t really want to do something that was set in the trenches, so to speak.”
— Michael Apted
852. “I’d always wanted to do something about the Second World War, but I didn’t want to do another combat film, whether it was air, land, or sea.”
— Michael Apted
853. “For me, the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together – many of them only because they helped Jews.”
— Simon Wiesenthal
854. “Surviving is the only glory in war.”
— Samuel Fuller
855. “The hope for the twentieth century rests on the recognition that war and depression are man-made and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding an increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline.”
— Carroll Quigley
856. “When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.”
— Neil Postman
857. “The House of Peers, throughout the war, did nothing in particular, and did it very well.”
— William Gilbert
858. “For a generation, terrorists learned they could make war on free nations without fear of war in return. On September 12, the terrorists got war in return.”
— Ken Mehlman
859. “At this moment, somewhere in the world, children died of starvation, bombs exploded to maim and kill the innocent, hurricanes destroyed everything in their path, but the loveliness of this moment was as real as wars and plagues and heartbreak. Pleasure and beauty are as valid as pain and ugliness and when I am fortunate enough to enjoy the former, I do so.”
— Carolyn Hart
860. “Miss Goldman is a Communist; I am an Individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property; I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should.”
— Voltairine de Cleyre
861. “Nevertheless, the mode, the justification, and all the games involved in this war were dishonest.”
— Dario Fo
862. “It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We’re reaching a time that we”ll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.”
— Maya Lin
863. “Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination.”
— Ryszard Kapuscinski
864. “The Civil War was about a lot of things, but the core of it was slavery. That was the original sin.”
— John Fund
865. “There have been brilliant satires about the tax bureaucracy before, from the Beatles song “The Taxman” to the film “Harry’s War,” but in some ways, Jim Greenfield’s The Taxman Cometh outdoes them all. His tale of a little guy who can’t take it anymore is both compelling and timely, given the tax scandals we read about in Washington almost every day.”
— John Fund
866. “We’ve been in a war and a recession. That’s why accent colors with yellow and purple are popular. They’re optimistic and flirty and happy colors.”
— David Bromstad
867. “Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapor, blowing where we listed Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert.”
— T. E. Lawrence
868. “To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”
— T. E. Lawrence
869. “There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain’t about to happen!”
— J. J. Johnson
870. “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
— Nigel Calder
871. “Philadelphia fans would boo funerals, an Easter egg hunt, a parade of armless war vets, and the Liberty Bell.”
— Bo Belinsky
872. “Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.”
— Laura Miller
873. “Ethical obligation has to subordinate itself to the totalitarian nature of war.”
— Karl Brandt
874. “N.Y. Chamber of Commerce Urges Passage of Silver for War Use.”
— Caryl Parker Haskins
875. “One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.”
— Anatol Rapoport
876. “Watched Star Wars in 77 and that’s when I got into watching films. I was just blown away by it.”
— Debra Wilson
877. “Men and women of the world, never again plan war! With this atomic bomb, war can only mean suicide for the human race. From this atomic waste the people of Nagasaki confront the world and cry out: No more war! Let us follow the commandment of love and work together. The people of Nagasaki prostrate themselves before God and pray: Grant that Nagasaki may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world.”
— Takashi Nagai
878. “Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden.”
— Barbara Olson
879. “I was born in 1923 into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.”
— Walter Kohn
880. “My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.”
— Walter Kohn
881. “The next World War will be over water”
— Ismail Serageldin
882. “More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.”
— Aaron Huey
883. “I’ve been as a pilot involved in the Gulf War. And then, in the No-Fly Zone.”
— Philippe Perrin
884. “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women, and children (and cattle).”
— Manis Friedman
885. “I don’t believe in Western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).”
— Manis Friedman
886. “Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.”
— Larry Brilliant
887. “A defensive referendum is for avoiding war and to help keep the Taiwanese people free of fear.”
— Chen Shui-bian
888. “Famine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obligated to work on the conditions which the state may demand from them… This famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or such complete exhaustions of the country’s resources in foreign and civil wars.”
— William Henry Chamberlin
889. “I came at age in the “60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time – the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.”
— David Talbot
890. “War only in the ring. Peace on earth
— Wanderlei Silva
891. “I had to learn to be honest with myself. I had to recognize my pain threshold. When I hit the floor, I have to realize it’s not as if I broke a bone. Pushing yourself over the barrier is a habit. I know I can do it and try something else crazy. If you want to win the war, you’ve got to pay the price.”
— Flo Hyman
892. “Without war, no State could be. All those we know of arose through war, and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history, as long as there is a multiplicity of states.”
— Heinrich von Treitschke
893. “The future is won or lost in the war of ideas.”
— Laurence Overmire
894. “If I had to go to war again, I’d bring lacrosse players.”
— Conn Smythe
895. “Hamas is responsible for countless homicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israeli citizens. They have waged a terror war with the sole intent of murdering innocent people.”
— Vito Fossella
896. “Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we’ve lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it’s the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.”
— Margaret Mead
897. “The Middle East is more angry than ever. I’m afraid that the sort of deceit on the route to war was linked to the lack of preparation for afterward and the chaos and suffering that continues – so it won’t go away will it?”
— Clare Short
898. “We need to make a distinction between misled Iraqis, those who believe that they are carrying weapons to liberate Iraq from what they call occupation, and criminal gangs that came from outside and want to wage a deadly war on the Iraqi people, killing women and children in mosques and churches.”
— Jalal Talabani
899. “We cannot take the president off the hook for an illegal war that was based on lies.”
— Dennis Kucinich
900. “My son was killed in a war without honor for the sake of lies.”
— Nadia McCaffrey
901. “It’s time to bury the war hatchet and to forget where it lies.”
— Viktor Yushchenko
902. “We need a people’s movement to end this war, … We’re going to ask them How many more of other people’s children are you willing to sacrifice for the lies.”
— Cindy Sheehan
903. “The capitalist can only make a whole people go to war . . . by capturing the popular will. The only prophylactic against that situation is to make the public aware of the way in which it is being misled.”
— Norman Angell
904. “It’s obvious that things aren’t going well over there. This is a war based on lies.”
— Cindy Sheehan
905. “It is a war built on lies that has fanned the flames of international terrorism.”
— Alex Salmond
906. “This was a war that was based on lies. It was wrong for us to invade Iraq. It’s wrong for us to occupy Iraq and we need to bring our troops home.”
— Cindy Sheehan
907. “Since the war, nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening.”
— Gertrude Stein
908. “When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.”
— Stefan Zweig
909. “Tell me, was it you or your brother who was killed in the war?”
— William Archibald Spooner
910. “I grew up between the two world wars and received a rather solid general education, the kind middle-class children enjoyed in a country whose educational system had its roots dating back to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.”
— George Andrew Olah
911. “We desperately need some new thinking today about systems of global governance. We’re stuck with the same obsolete, ignore-the-earth institutions that were brought into being after the 2nd World War, and they’re now failing us ever more catastrophically. Wild Law shows just how radical we now need to be in creating new institutions that are genuinely “fit for purpose” in the 21st Century.”
— Jonathon Porritt
912. “The interesting thing is that I found scenes which I put together which could appeal to almost every woman, or apply to almost every woman after the war. Falling in love, dancing, marrying.”
— Maximilian Schell
913. “Every year at this time, an important phrase marks the season: peace on earth and goodwill towards men. It’s so common we sometimes forget about what it really means – that we strive for a world without war, a society where we respect and help our neighbors, a place where we protect and uplift our most in need. This isn’t a phrase we should live by for one day or one month. It’s a set of values that must bond and motivate us every day.”
— Dennis Kucinich
914. “I am a Death Dealer, sworn to destroy those known as the Lycans. Our war has waged for centuries, unseen by human eyes.”
— Kate Beckinsale
915. “The President regards the Japanese as a brave people; but courage, though useful in time of war, is subordinate to knowledge of arts; hence, courage without such knowledge is not to be highly esteemed.”
— Townsend Harris
916. “It is history that teaches us to hope.”
— Robert E. Lee
917. “The idea that you can make love and not war really is pretty neat. That thing in Korea, the thing in Israel – that’s all over the world. There must be a new way of thinking.”
— F. Murray Abraham
918. “This war so far has cost us $125 billion and counting, because largely we decided to do it on our own, with only the United Kingdom as a paying, fully participating partner.”
— John Spratt
919. “Ukraine has been a strong partner to the United States on international initiatives and a committed ally in fighting the War on Terrorism.”
— Vito Fossella
920. “My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.”
— Douglass North
921. “It was post-war. It was very gray, very dreary. Everything was still rationed when I first saw the United States in 1951. I went over to visit my sister who was a war bride.”
— John Mahoney
922. “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
923. “Use justice to rule a country. Use surprise to wage war. Use non-action to govern the world.”
— Laozi
924. “When many people are killed, they should be mourned and lamented. Those who are victorious in war should follow the rites of funerals.”
— Laozi
925. “When the Way governs the world, the proud stallions drag dung carriages. When the Way is lost to the world, war horses are bred outside the city.”
— Laozi
926. “You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,” said Winston tentatively. The old man’s pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents … “The beer was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer – wallop we used to call it – was four pence a pint. That was before the war, of course.” “Which war was that?” said Winston. “It’s all wars,” said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. “Era’s wishing you the very best of “earth!”
— George Orwell
927. “We experienced similar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s.”
— Daniel Yergin
928. “Since the end of the Second World War, our population has more than doubled to 27 million people.”
— Kim Campbell
929. “After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.”
— Kenzaburo Oe
930. “Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.”
— Christopher Bond
931. “The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets – an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.”
— Fredric Jameson
932. “The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.”
— Hans Blix
933. “The international order established at the end of World War II could certainly have been worse. However, this order did contain certain factors which bore within them the seeds of instability.”
— Eisaku Sato
934. “After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.”
— Harry Seidler
935. “For as long as this nation has known war, we have embraced the heroes it has produced. Americans have rightfully noted the honor and nobility of courage under hostile fire and thanked those who perished in their defense.”
— James T. Walsh
936. “I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.”
— Jessica Mitford
937. “Men o” war were to be a part of the fabric of my life for the next half-century.”
— Lord Mountbatten
938. “Milosevic will never stop, because he is fighting for personal power in Serbia. The only way to stop him is by cutting the functioning of his war machine. He is spending $1.7 million a day on his war machine in Kosovo.”
— Fatos Nano
939. “Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that human beings are rational and are made to seek the truth.”
— Timothy Radcliffe
940. “To a mankind that recognizes the equality of man everywhere, every war becomes a civil war.”
— Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
941. “There is an old and a new consciousness of the age. The old one is directed towards the individual. The new one is directed towards the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal may be seen both in the world war and in modern art.”
— Theo van Doesburg
942. “One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don’t know anything you don’t need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you.”
— Abraham Pais
943. “You may evade justice but in our eyes, you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder, and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans – my fellow veterans – whose future you stole.”
— Thomas Young
944. “From the time of independence until the end of the Cold War, in spite of the participation of a considerable number of African states in the non-aligned movement, everyone in fact chose to align with one or another of the two major blocks.”
— Omar Bongo
945. “Hamas, also elected to governmental leadership in Palestine, includes the jihadists, people who have declared war on the United States of America and its ally, Israel.”
— Zach Wamp
946. “The Sangh Parivar, against which I had been waging a war, misled the people. My opponents used the Election Commission and the bureaucracy to win a political battle.”
— Lalu Prasad Yadav
947. “I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can.”
— Lee Kuan Yew
948. “I’ve learned that courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin and that every warrior, every humanitarian, every citizen is built to live with both. In fact, to win a war, to create peace, to save a life, or just to live a good life requires of us – of every one of us – that we be both good and strong.”
— Eric Greitens
949. “The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.”
— David Stockman
950. “War, in some instances, especially defensive, has been authorized by Heaven.”
— Ezra Stiles
951. “Adherence to dogmas has destroyed more armies and cost more battles than anything in war.”
— J. F. C. Fuller
952. “This war no longer has anything to do with knightly conduct or with the agreements of the Geneva Convention.”
— Wilhelm Keitel
953. “The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.”
— Wilhelm Keitel
954. “If this war is not fought with the greatest brutality against the bands both in the East and in the Balkans then in the foreseeable future the strength at our disposal will not be sufficient to be able to master this plague.”
— Wilhelm Keitel
955. “Life has become terribly insecure. It’s on the vortex of civil war. It’s difficult to know how America will bring it back from the brink and build up goodwill.”
— Jon Lee Anderson
956. “The Sandinista government became consumed with fighting a war of survival. They were up against the biggest superpower in the world.”
— Bianca Jagger
957. “There is a question for which we will never know the answer: had the U.S. not launched the Contra war to overthrow the Sandinista government, would they have succeeded in bringing socioeconomic justice to the people of Nicaragua?”
— Bianca Jagger
958. “After the war, there was no industry. We lost the war. We had our whole city destroyed. No money. No studio. No film. No camera. No equipment. We would shoot in the street. We had no actors. Nothing. But we wanted to do movies. And we did the best movies in the world.”
— Dino De Laurentiis
959. “Virtually all of Africa’s civil wars were started by politically marginalized or excluded groups.”
— George Ayittey
960. “A personal story of the horrors that Poles lived through during World War II. When God Looked the Other Way, above all else, explains why there is still a Poland…. One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face.”
— Arnold Beichman
961. “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war… and why do people want peace if the war is so much fun?”
— Adrian Carton de Wiart
962. “I am appalled by the notion of cultural wars.”
— Jim Leach
963. “This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this.”
— Mary Heaton Vorse
964. “In the World War [WW1] nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading.”
— J. F. C. Fuller
965. “It is absolutely true in war, were other things equal, that numbers, whether men, shells, bombs, etc., would be supreme. Yet it is also absolutely true that other things are never equal and can never be equal.”
— J. F. C. Fuller
966. “What thrust us into war were not Hitler’s political teachings: the cause, this time, was his successful attempt to establish a new economy. The causes of the war were: envy, greed, and fear.”
— J. F. C. Fuller
967. “Peace through strength works; but the flip side is war invited by weakness.”
— Pete Hegseth
968. “President Lincoln chose to fight a bloody and unpopular war because he believed the enemy had to be defeated. He was right.”
— Pete Hegseth
969. “The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt.”
— F. L. Lucas
970. “One would think that man would run out of wars.”
— Dalton Camp
971. “We are no longer in the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun. This is the time in-between, the time of transition. As we pass through transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth Changes.”
— Carlos Barrios
972. “It oughtn’t to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sunrise.”
— Jan Struther
973. “The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.”
— Jan Peter Balkenende
974. “The generation which lived through the Second World War is disappearing. Post-war generations see Europe’s great achievements – liberty, peace, and prosperity – as a given.”
— Jan Peter Balkenende
975. “It’s true that humanity has seen a succession of crises, wars and atrocities, but this negative side is offset by advances in technology and cultural exchanges.”
— Abbe Pierre
976. “My parents demonstrated against the Vietnam war, they were into the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and they started the first vegetarian restaurant in Pittsburgh.”
— Justin Sane
977. “If you try to fix violence with violence, you do NOTHING but create violence.”
— Tom DeLonge
978. “When a man goes into the ring, he’s going to war.”
— Marvin Hagler
979. “The principle of compulsory service, embodied in the system of conscription, lies been the means by which modern dictators and military gangs have shackled their people after a coup d’état, and bound them to their own aggressive purposes. In view of the great service that conscription has rendered to tyranny and war, it is fundamentally shortsighted for any liberty-loving and peace-desiring peoples to maintain it as an imagined safeguard, lest they become the victims of the monster they have helped to preserve.”
— B. H. Liddell Hart
980. “Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.”
— Harri Holkeri
981. “I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.”
— Pamela Hansford Johnson
982. “Because of my voice, speaking words which had been carefully chosen, women had used the money they had set aside for other purposes to buy war bonds.”
— Kate Smith
983. “What with the political monopoly, the Cheka, and the Red Army, all that now existed of the “Commune-State” of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give day to reaction.”
— Victor Serge
984. “It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar- the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.”
— Anthony Swofford
985. “A story: A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward, he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the rifle.”
— Anthony Swofford
986. “Should I be the happy mortal destined to turn the scale of war, will you not rejoice, O my father?”
— Zebulon Pike
987. “The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance.”
— Marco Tempest
988. “Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.”
— Giannina Braschi
989. “Even if Hitler at the last moment would want to avoid war which would destroy him he will, in spite of his wishes, be compelled to wage war.”
— Emil Ludwig
990. “A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: Did you do this? Picasso calmly replied: No, you did this!”
— Slavoj Žižek
991. “There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose?”
— Garry Wills
992. “There has been only one war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men’s all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.”
— Sonia Johnson
993. “There are two kinds of people in this world. There are the people who will have you think that there are two kinds of people in this world, and there are the “good; people. There is no good, there is no evil, there is just a war going on between the people that want you to think there’s a war going on and the people that know there doesn’t have to be one.”
— Dan Harmon
994. “We’re at war against the ultimate evil in the world, and We’re going to win.
— Johnny Isakson
995. “New developments in weapon systems during the 1950s and early 1960s created a situation that was most dangerous, and even conducive to accidental war.”
— Herman Kahn
996. “Anything that reduces war-related destruction should not be considered altogether immoral.”
— Herman Kahn
997. “If today is your typical day in America, 80 of our fellow citizens will die from gunfire. In the last two weeks, more Americans have died from gunfire here at home in the United States than in the entire war in Iraq since it started.”
— Michael D. Barnes
998. “Everything changed in Bosnia when General Wesley Clark proved that you could fight a war with high-level precision air strikes and a bare minimum of ground action.”
— Joe Bob Briggs
999. “I am going to fight – I, a socialist and Syndicalist – so that we shall make an end to war, so that the little ones of France will sleep in peace, and the women go without fear.”
— Philip Gibbs
1000. “Enforcement is the long overdue step to protect our Nation from external threats in a time of war. And then once we do that, we can effectively discuss a guest worker program.”
— J. D. Hayworth
1001. “After the war, prompted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, I entered Parliament so that a priest could speak out for the poor, as canon law at that time still permitted.”
— Abbe Pierre