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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"Muhammad divided the world in two sectors. One he called Dar us Salam (House of Peace) and the other, Dar al Harb (House of War). All countries, where Islam is not the ruling authority, are Dar al Harb. It is the duty of the Muslims to wage Jihad in Dar al Harb, overthrow the governments and force people into submission. This is the only kind of peace that Islam recognizes."
"Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer."
"Being in Cuba has allowed me to live in a society that is not at war with itself. There is a sense of community. It's a given in Cuba that, if you fall down, the person next to you is going to help you get up."
"I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism."
"No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it."
"...men are not put into this world to go the path of ease, they are put into this world to go the path of pain and struggle."
"The purpose of all wars, is peace."
"Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed."
"A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace."
"[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century."
"What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war."
"Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war."
"War would end if the dead could return."
"We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, 'The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.' We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth."
"One mark of a great soldier is that he fight on his own terms or fights not at all."
"So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak."
"If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril."
"Birds rising in flight is a sign that the enemy is lying in ambush; when the wild animals are startled and flee he is trying to take you unaware."
"If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need to do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way."
"Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men."
