Quotes about war

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

— Niccolo Machiavelli

War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.

— Joseph De Maistre

Wars are carried out by large organizations; Peace is brought one by one.

— Rachel Manor

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.

— Allan Massie

Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.

— Francis Meehan

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

— H. L. Mencken

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice -- is often the means of their regeneration.

— John Stuart Mill

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

— Lewis Mumford

War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.

— Benito Mussolini

In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.

— Jose Narosky

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

— Florence Nightingale

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

— George Orwell

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

— George Orwell

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

— Wilfred Owen

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

The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.

— Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

— Leslie Parrish-Bach

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

— Ezra Pound

Wars are made to make debt.

— Ezra Pound

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

— German Proverb

War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune.

— Sir Walter Raleigh

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

— Jeannette Rankin

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

— Ronald Reagan

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

War is a contagion.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.

— Bertrand Russell

Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated -- there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

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

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name.

— William Shakespeare

Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial.

— William Shakespeare

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

— George Bernard Shaw

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent -- war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

— Susan Sontag

Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.

— Sun Tzu

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

— Sun Tzu

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

— Henry David Thoreau

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

— Henry David Thoreau

There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

— Mark Twain

War -- what a waist of time. It's all about great achievements for the very few but hideous losses for the very many.

— Source Unknown

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

— John Updike

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

So you think you can tell heaven from hell blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, a smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change? Did you exchange a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?

— R. Waters

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

— Simone Weil

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

— Simone Weil

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have it's fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

— Oscar Wilde

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or our country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share.

— Virginia Woolf

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

It is far easier to make war than to make peace.

— Georges Clemenceau

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

— Edward Dahlberg

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.

— Mahatma Gandhi

War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.

— Ian Hay

A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.

— Ambrose Bierce

For cowards the road of desertion should be left open; they will carry over to the enemy nothing, but their fears.

— Christian Nevell Bovee

Faint heart never won fair lady.

— Miguel De Cervantes

How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.

— Jeremy Collier

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.

— Confucius

Cowards falter, but danger is often overcome by those who nobly dare.

— Queen's Mother Elizabeth

Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person, but with their life. Cowardice is the dread of what will happen.

— Epictetus

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

— Mahatma Gandhi

Cowards can never be moral.

— Mahatma Gandhi

Cowards are cruel, but the brave love mercy and delight to save.

— John Gay

The coward threatens when he is safe.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

— Ernest Hemingway

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

— Eric Hoffer

It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward.

— Dolores Ibarruri

A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

— Thomas Jefferson

It is the coward who fawns upon those above him. It is the coward who is insolent whenever he dares be so.

— Junius

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.

— Marvin Kitman

Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.

— George A. Knight

I'm a hero with coward's legs.

— Spike Milligan

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

— Edgar Allan Poe

It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life.

— Irish Proverb

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

— Ayn Rand

All men would be cowards if they could.

— Earl Rochester

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

— Quintus Curtius Rufus

When the adulation of life is gone, the coward sneaks to his death, but the brave live on.

— George Sewell

Cowards die a thousand deaths. The valiant taste of death but once.

— William Shakespeare

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

— George Bernard Shaw

My valor is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have sometimes made a hero of the same man who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning would have proved a coward.

— Philip Dormer Stanhope

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

— Robert S. Surtees

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.

— Mark Twain

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

— Mark Twain

A coward gets scared and quits. A hero gets scared, but still goes on.

— Source Unknown

The cowards never started -- and the weak died along the way.

— Source Unknown

One of the chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.

— Voltaire

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men.

— Bishop Westcott

War is the father of all things. But who is the mother?

— Gerhard Kocher

We don’t invade countries for the reasons we're told or we would’ve done a lot of things about a lot of things. They tell you things like they hate freedom so you’re okay with them attacking but it’s for other reasons.

— James Dye

What our sword has won in half a year, our sword must guard for half a century.

— Helmuth Graf von Moltke

It is fortunate that war is so terrible, lest we become to fond of it.

— Robert E. Lee

Its good to hear from soldiers; I hope your voices are heard, and that your wounds are never hidden, so that maybe our children won't have to repeat what we've already been through time and time again.

— James Dye

The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.

— John Steinbeck