Motivational Quotes

War

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.

- Benedict, Ruth

Best Quotes about War

It is one of the most beautiful compensations in life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

War is the father of all things. But who is the mother?

Kocher, Gerhard

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

Hoffer, Eric

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

Twain, Mark

Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Heller, Joseph

A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have sometimes made a hero of the same man who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning would have proved a coward.

Stanhope, Philip Dormer

When the adulation of life is gone, the coward sneaks to his death, but the brave live on.

Sewell, George

I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.

Frank, Anne

10.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

George Orwell

11.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war --for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.

Lennon, John

12.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

13.

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Thoreau, Henry David

14.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Graves, Robert

15.

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

Arendt, Hannah

16.

A new kind of award has been added -- the deathbed award. It is not an award of any kind. Either the recipient has not acted at all, or was not nominated, or did not win the award the last few times around. It is intended to relieve the guilty conscience of the Academy members and save face in front of the public. The Academy has the horrible taste to have a star, choking with emotion, present this deathbed award so that there can be no doubt in anybody's mind why the award is so hurriedly given. Lucky is the actor who is too sick to watch the proceedings on television.

Dietrich, Marlene

17.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Woolf, Virginia

18.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice -- is often the means of their regeneration.

Mill, John Stuart

19.

A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.

Bierce, Ambrose

20.

A wage hike is very hard to take away, but bonuses and profit-sharing can disappear very quickly in hard times...More people are realizing that bonuses look like raises, but really aren't.

Bauman, Al

21.

It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee

22.

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

23.

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood

Grant, Phillip C.

24.

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

Hoffman, Abbie

25.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

King Jr. Martin Luther

26.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

27.

One of the chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.

Voltaire

28.

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.

Coward, Noel

29.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Churchill, Winston

30.

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.

Benedict, Ruth

31.

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.

Confucius

32.

The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.

Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi

33.

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

Kennedy, John F.

34.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Crisp, Quentin

35.

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

Eliot, T. S.

36.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

37.

A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

Jefferson, Thomas

38.

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

39.

War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the sheltered life. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.

Gosse, Sir Edmund

40.

A just war is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

Cockburn, Alexander

41.

Neither enemy faces, nor the mothers that love them, come to mind when one is thinking of nothing but endeavouring to survive. Philosophising about war is useless under fire.

Linda Berdoll

42.

What are we hoping to get out of it, what's it all in aid of -- is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?

Osborne, John

43.

I see that old flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.

Macarthur, Douglas

44.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

45.

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.

Kipling, Rudyard

46.

War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

Bagehot, Walter

47.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.

Clausewitz, Karl Von

48.

He that does good for good's sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

Penn, William

49.

Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!

Blok, Alexander

50.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.