War quotes
17K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"The post-Second World War simple system of social democracy and organized labour has fragmented massively, but just because people aren't organized in workplace trade unions doesn't mean they aren't in associations with other people - work-based, place-based, culture-based, sport-based, faith-based - there's a bit of an old rainbow coalition argument."
"The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity."
"I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me."
"The first half of Vietnam was fought to win the war, and the second half of Vietnam was soldiers going haywire without a mission, getting further and further towards our friend, Captain Kurtz and our friends at 'Apocalypse Now.'"
"We cannot risk living all our lives under emergency measures."
"We need an adequate defense, but every arms dollar we spend above adequacy has a long-term weakening effect upon the nation and its security."
"The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperation among nations, can be fortified not by weapons of war but by wheat and cotton, by milk and wool, by meat and timber, and by rice. These are words that translate into every language."
"War is a contest, and you finally get to a point where you are talking merely about race suicide, and nothing else."
"We must be strong at home if we are going to be strong abroad. We understand that. So we want to be strong at home in our morale or in our spirit, we want to be strong intellectually, in our education, in our economy and, where necessary, militarily."
"We know something of the cost of that war. We were in it from December seventh, '41, till August of '45. Ever since that time, we have been waging peace. It has had its ups and downs just as the war did."
"More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America with straightaways, cloverleaf turns, bridges, and elongated parkways. Its impact on the American economy-the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up-was beyond calculation."
"No amphibious attack in history has approached this one in size. Along miles of coastline there were hundreds of vessels and small boats afloat and ant-like files of advancing troops ashore."
"I have spent my life in the study of military strength as a deterrent to war, and in the character of military armaments necessary to win a war. The study of the first of these questions is still profitable, but we are rapidly getting to the point that no war can be won."
"War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil."
"Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give you the signal."
"We do not keep security establishments merely to defend property or territory or rights abroad or at sea. We keep the security forces to defend a way of life."
"First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. This lesson we learned in World War II. I lived that lesson in Europe. Others lived it in the Pacific. Millions of American veterans learned it well."
"Because, therefore, we are defending a way of life, we must be respectful of that way of life as we proceed to the solution of our problem. We must not violate its principles and its precepts, and we must not destroy from within what we are trying to defend from without."
"And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out."
"The hope of the world is that wisdom can arrest conflict between brothers. I believe that war is the deadly harvest of arrogant and unreasoning minds. And I find grounds for this belief in the wisdom literature of Proverbs. It says in effect this: Panic strikes like a storm and calamity comes like a whirlwind to those who hate knowledge and ignore their God."
