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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"When a general, unable to estimate the enemy's strength, allows an inferior force to engage a larger one, or hurls a weak detachment against a powerful one, and neglects to place picked soldiers in the front rank, the result must be rout."
"Life is getting better, but that won't stop a war if politicians and business people decide it's to their advantage to have one."
"Adherence to dogmas has destroyed more armies and cost more battles than anything in war."
"In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments."
"In war, as in love, we must come into contact before we triumph."
"All generals, officers, and soldiers who capitulate in battle to save their own lives should be decimated."
"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momentary."
"How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read."
"Not just in China, but everywhere in the world without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or the side of socialism. Neutrality is mere camouflage; a third road does not exist."
"Our country and all the other socialist countries want peace; so do the peoples of all the countries of the world. The only ones who crave war and do not want peace are certain monopoly capitalist groups in a handful of imperialist countries that depend on aggression for their profits."
"How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?"
"We may think of peace as the absence of war, that if the great powers would reduce their weapons arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we will see our own minds - our own prejudices, fears, and ignorance."
"The reason is that nature has so created men that they are able to desire everything but are not able to attain everything: so that the desire being always greater than the acquisition, there results discontent with the possession and little satisfaction to themselves from it. From this arises the changes in their fortunes; for as men desire, some to have more, some in fear of losing their acquisition, there ensues enmity and war, from which results the ruin of that province and the elevation of another."
"War's tragedy is that it uses man's best to do man's worst."
"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."
"Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those 'good Germans' who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo."
"How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?"
"War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves."
"Our top-down pyramid style of management is a very old concept borrowed from centuries of war and monarchies."
"Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another."
