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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"Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars."
"The case against vivisection is the same as that against war and all other forms of cruelty - that violence does not produce long-term solutions."
"Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature."
"Ah! These commercial interests -- spoiling the finest life under the sun. Why must the sea be used for trade -- and for war as well?...It would have been so much nicer just to sail about, with here and there a port and a bit of land to stretch one's legs on, buy a few books and get a change of cooking for a while."
"It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."
"Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out."
"History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents."
"When the war broke out I decided I would be very patriotic. Standing my full height. I presented myself to the Wacs and the to the Waves. And I was rejected - I was an inch too tall."
"Powder is but a thing of yesterday, and war is as old as the human race--unhappily."
"During the War of the Rebellion, a new and influential club was established in the city of Baltimore in the State of Maryland"
"Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive."
"As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another."
"There's so many bigger things in the world. The art world is such a tiny little thing compared to wars and migration crises. It's weird to be self-absorbed in it."
"With lines that show an unyielding dedication to craft, these poems are not afraid of meaning or the meaningful. More and more every day, the thinking American asks how she is to believe in love when there is war all about her, and in each of her deeply felt lyrics, Elyse Fenton confronts this question with the kind of tenderness one lover reserves for another. If every poem is indeed a love poem,Clamor is indeed a debut worth reading and about which we must make noise."
"Every politician in the world is all for revolution, reason, and disarmament-but only in enemy countries, not in his own."
"I have learned a new form of service from the wars of Frederick, king of Prussia. It is not necessary to approach the enemy in order to attack him. In fleeing from him, it is possible to circumvent him as he advances and fall on him from the rear and force him to surrender. What is needed is not to strike straight at evil but to withdraw to the sources of divine power, and from there to circle around evil, bend it and transform it into its opposite."
"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."
"The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council."
"Beware the toils of war ... the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world."
"I war not with the dead."
