Military quotes
4.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Peace will come soon to stay, and so come as to be worth keeping in all future time. It will then have proved that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure their cases and pay the costs."
"Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it a shocking and terrifying event [9/11], particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people. It was aimed at symbols: the World Trade Center, the heart of American capitalism, and the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American military establishment."
"Every nation has its prestigious military academies - or so few of them - that reach not only the virtues of peace but also the art of attaining it? I mean attaining and protecting it by means other than weapons, the tools of war. Why are we surprised whenever war recedes and yields to peace?"
"You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder and backed by their military interests, have their own dynamic functions."
"The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class."
"Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object."
"For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive."
"ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country."
"The shovel is the brother to the gun."
"Almost everything that is great has been done by youth."
"It is on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular."
"I deplore the need or the use of troops anywhere to get American citizens to obey the orders of constituted courts."
"I used to have a military officer travelling with me at all times with a suitcase - referred to as the nuclear football - in case it had to be used."
"The sergeant was describing a military life. It was all drinking, he said, except that there were frequent intervals of eating and love making."
"The commander of the forces of a large State may be carried off, but the will of even a common man cannot be taken from him."
"We have to have armies! We have to have military power! We have to have police forces, whether it's police in a great city or police in an international scale to keep those madmen from taking over the world and robbing the world of its liberties."
""America's Cold War veterans deserve every honor we can bestow upon them for their hard work and dedication to keeping our nation safe,". "The Cold War Service Medal would allow military service members, veterans, and their families to receive the recognition and honor they rightfully deserve. I will continue to work with my colleagues to ensure our veterans receive the support and care they and their families need. It's the least we can do as a grateful nation.""
"America should meet its obligations in the form of Social Security, Medicare, our ability to pay our military, legally binding legislation that allows unemployment compensation, the judiciary, the federal court system, the federal prison system, all those kinds of things have to be paid for."
"A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war."
"In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties. Compulsory military service seems to me the most disgraceful symptom of that deficiency in personal dignity from which civilized mankind is suffering today."
