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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"Set the mind to work, and apply the thoughts vigorously to the business, for it holds in the struggles of the mind, as in those of war, that to think we shall conquer is to conquer."
"Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ, must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices. It is in vain for any man to usurp the name of Christian, without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit."
"[D]rawing up 'secret war plans' for a possible attack on Iraq wasn't irrational. The low-level war against Saddam was 12 years old, with no end in sight. American and British pilots were getting shot at, sanctions weren't working, and Bush was getting warnings that Saddam had all those terrible weapons and would use them against America. Bush would have been a fool not to draw up plans. Gee, wait till the critics find out that FDR, without ever informing the media, was plotting to fight Japan and Germany before Pearl Harbor."
"When you've married someone who's been at war, there is nothing you can do that compares to that level of selflessness and bravery."
"War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can."
"The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible."
"And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man."
"It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate."
"My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size."
"When I was a kid, we watched the Vietnam War on the six o'clock news, and it was desensitizing. You felt you were watching a war film; meanwhile you were really watching these guys getting blown to bits. Parents need to protect their kids from watching that stuff."
"Maybe we should hold the next [Olympic] games in Afghanistan and hope the Soviets pull out of that one too."
"The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country."
"The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people."
"'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves."
"In other words, United States, our values, the way that we occupy ourselves in terms of saying here's the way we stand in this country when we go to war, it's not that we go in and we kill off anybody, including families. We don't take the riches. We don't claim the women. My God, that's not America."
"American people are a little tired of anybody saying, let's get back in war. Why don't we go back (inaudible)."
"You go back and look at things like Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, a lot of people dying in state-sponsored arm conflict"
"Phil Hicks was the guy that was in the ROTC, that was going to go into the Vietnam War and thought that was the responsibility of the citizen."
"The Gulf War was a clear precedent as well, and it let us begin to understand how the US government would go to war to secure strategic oil reserves and potential markets."
"I think that many of the mobilizations against the wars waged by the US and its allies since 2001 have been non-violent and massive. We have seen them throughout European capitals and in the US, and in many other parts of the world as well. So it is not only imaginable, but already actual."
