War quotes
17K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside war — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"If we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies I would jump at it. But the only safe way is to convince Hitler that he cannot beat us."
"What is our policy? ... to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime."
"It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last."
"If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both."
"Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion."
"We took up our positions, in obedience to instructions."
"At home it's all Batman and Star Wars and they do gang up on me. Sometimes I don't want to dress up as Darth Vader or play train sets, so I'll go out for a drink with the girls."
"I simply write what I want, wish, long to write.... The state of human life and the god or demon within. The constant internal war that being alive can conjure."
"Indeed I am inclined to go so far as to say that the one cause for which one may properly make war is the cause of peace."
"In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven."
"For, as I said a little way back, perfect souls are in no way repelled by trials, but rather desire them and pray for them and love them. They are like soldiers: the more wars there are, the better they are pleased, because they hope to emerge from them with the greater riches."
"E'en in mid-harvest, while the jocund swain Pluck'd from the brittle stalk the golden grain, Oft have I seen the war of winds contend, And prone on earth th' infuriate storm descend, Waste far and wide, and by the roots uptorn, The heavy harvest sweep through ether borne, As light straw and rapid stubble fly In dark'ning whirlwinds round the wintry sky."
"War is not women's history."
"war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male."
"The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking."
"So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."
"Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us."
"Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace."
"First, his job approval ratings have been trending down for many months, a trend that has accelerated in recent weeks as the war on terrorism has been supplanted in the public's mind by corporate scandals, stock market declines, and a growing sense of economic insecurity."
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state."
