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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"Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence."
"Where one despises, one cannot wage war."
"Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu , virtue free of moral acid)."
"It is nothing but fanaticism and beautiful soulism to expect very much (or even, much only) from humanity when it has forgotten how to wage war."
"But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more."
"In war personal revenge maintains its silence."
"Only in war are you holy, and when you are robbers and cruel."
"You should seek your enemy, you should wage your war - a war for your opinions. And when your opinion is defeatedy our honesty should still cry triumph over that!"
"Your enemy shall ye seek; your war shall ye wage, and for the sake of your thoughts! And if your thoughts succumb, your uprightness shall still shout triumph thereby!"
"At heart I am a warrior."
"Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet."
"The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd."
"Religious War has signified the greatest advance of the masses so far, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with respect."
"So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!"
"Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one."
"I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history."
"For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban. I wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity for decades, that the history of the Afghans in the twentieth century has been largely pacific and harmonious."
"At least, it is encouraging to me that President [Barack] Obama has put Afghanistan front and center in this broader so-called War on terror, and that he is taking a different approach to Afghanistan."
"when a great war has cut off the young men of a nation it never can be told thereafter what losses of scholars, poets, thinkers and great designers the country and the world have suffered."
"Republicans have been losing the war of words for years now. Now they are just caving because they don't even want to try. I don't agree with that approach."
