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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"Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild...It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law."
"We love action and adventure, but we use it to go out and start wars and kill people."
"I got to meet Mark Hamill. He signed some Star Wars posters for us. I saw the fight scenes he had. He was really into making fun of himself and Star Wars."
"I was never a cool person; in fact, cool people have always made fun of me. That’s why I loved [the Robert Cormier YA novel] The Chocolate War - because the cool kids (not the establishment) were the villains. I totally identified with that."
"War is the supreme form of prestige."
"Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes."
"Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction."
"War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always."
"In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable."
"Taking Viagra after open heart surgery is like a Civil War re-enactment with live ammo. Not good."
"Terrible wars have been fought where millions have died for one idea - freedom. And it seems that something that means so much to so many people would be worth having."
"If women ran the world there would be no wars. However every 28 days there would be some very intense negotiations."
"My father never felt the need to wrap himself in anybody's mantle. He never felt the need to pretend to be anybody else. This is their administration. This is their war. If they can't stand on their own two feet, well, they're no Ronald Reagans, that's for sure."
"Mankind's journey into space, like every great voyage of discovery, will become part of our unending journey of liberation. In the limitless reaches of space, we will find liberation from tyranny, from scarcity, from ignorance and from war. We will find the means to protect this Earth and to nurture every human life, and to explore the universe. . . .This is our mission, this is our destiny."
"It's time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause."
"I think all of us are agreed that war is probably man's greatest stupidity and I think peace is the dream that lives in the heart of everyone wherever he may be in the world, but unfortunately, unlike a family quarrel, it doesn't take two to make a war. It only takes one, unless the other one is prepared to surrender at the first hint of force."
"A clever general... avoids an army when its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish and inclined to return. This is the art of studying moods. Disciplined and calm, he awaits the appearance of disorder and hubbub among the enemy. This is the art of retaining self-possession."
"If quick, I survive. If not quick, I am lost. This is death."
"Ponder and deliberate before you make your move. He will conquer who has learned the artifice of deviation. Such is the art of maneuvering."
"If the world had attended me after World War II, it would have been united within seven years, and there would have been no suffering of the Unification Church and no damage to the democratic world."
