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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"What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist."
"Guns and tanks and planes are nothing unless there is a solid spirit, a solid heart, and great productiveness behind it."
"We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it."
"Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunder made by their commanders."
"You can't have this kind of war. There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets."
"...the exchange of students...should be vastly expanded...Information and education are powerful forces in support of peace. Just as war begins in the minds of men, so does peace."
"I have, throughout my private war, been a she, a you,a Donna, a me, and finally, an I....If you sense distance,you're not mistaken; it's real. Welcome to my world."
"Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift."
"But if we hide ourselves away, afraid to grow and learn, we might wake up in the flames of the ignorance that burns and we'll never be much more than only casualties of war in a struggle we can't win if we have no faith to begin. We've got to tip the lid and let some sunlight in."
"Though times have changed, it's a nice surprise to see that youthful feeling of anti-war sentiment returning once more to the cobbled main streets of Europe."
"The terror created by weaponry has never stopped men from employing them."
"The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies."
"The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives, and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century."
"My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother."
"My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure."
"To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things - but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature."
"What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? O yes!"
"So here we have found a means of a) alienating even the most flexible and patient Palestinians; while b) frustrating the efforts of the more principled and compromising Israelis; while c) empowering and financing some of the creepiest forces in American and Israeli society; and d) heaping ordure on our own secular founding documents. When will the Justice Department and the Congress and the Supreme Court become aware of this huge and rank offense, which is designed to bring us ever nearer to holy war?"
"Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R."
"I am aware that my name has been connected with all the bank robberies in the country; but positively I had nothing to do with any one of them. I look upon my life since the war as a blank, and will never say anything to make it appear otherwise."
