Motivational Quotes

War

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people.

- Davis, Rebecca Harding

Best Quotes about War

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

For cowards the road of desertion should be left open; they will carry over to the enemy nothing, but their fears.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

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

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

Sewell, George

Those who dare to interpret God's will must never claim Him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.

Runcie, Robert

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

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

10.

The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).

Mamet, David

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.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

Lois McMaster Bujold

13.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

Breton, Andre

14.

Wars are carried out by large organizations; Peace is brought one by one.

Manor, Rachel

15.

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

16.

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

Hazlitt, William

17.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.

Twain, Mark

18.

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

Buddha

19.

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

Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi

20.

Davis, Rebecca Harding

21.

Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.

Lawrence, Frieda

22.

Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.

Knight, George A.

23.

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood

Grant, Phillip C.

25.

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

I'm a hero with coward's legs.

Milligan, Spike

27.

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

Voltaire

28.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

Rorty, Richard

29.

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

30.

It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

Baudouin I

31.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

32.

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

Penn, William

33.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Orwell, George

34.

You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

Will Rogers

35.

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

Macarthur, Douglas

36.

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

37.

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

38.

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.

Omar Bradley

39.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.

Cooke, E. V.

41.

Cowards die a thousand deaths. The valiant taste of death but once.

Shakespeare, William

42.

How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.

Collier, Jeremy

43.

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

Sayers, Dorothy L.

44.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Carl Sandburg

45.

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

46.

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

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

Blok, Alexander

48.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

King Jr. Martin Luther

49.

It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.

Gandhi, Mahatma

50.

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.

Kitman, Marvin