Motivational Quotes

War

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

- Early, Gerald

Best Quotes about War

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

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

Cowards can never be moral.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

Dahlberg, Edward

A coward gets scared and quits. A hero gets scared, but still goes on.

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

Voltaire

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

10.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

12.

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

Gandhi, Mahatma

13.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

14.

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

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.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short

17.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Benn, Tony

18.

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

19.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

Reagan, Ronald

21.

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

Will Rogers

22.

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

23.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

Ulysses S. Grant

24.

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

25.

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood

Grant, Phillip C.

26.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Benjamin, Walter

27.

It is the coward who fawns upon those above him. It is the coward who is insolent whenever he dares be so.

Junius

28.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

29.

My valor is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

30.

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

31.

War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

32.

Greater even than the pious man is he who eats that which is the fruit of his own toil; for scripture declares him twice-blessed.

Talmud, The

33.

The pioneers of a warless world are the young men and women who refuse military service.

Einstein, Albert

34.

Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow -- perhaps it all will.

Einstein, Albert

35.

The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.

Homer

36.

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Twain, Mark

40.

So you think you can tell heaven from hell blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, a smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change? Did you exchange a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?

Waters, R.

41.

O can't you see, brother -- Death's a congested road for fighters now, and hero a cheap label.

Andrews, C. D.

42.

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

Hazlitt, William

43.

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

Clausewitz, Karl Von

44.

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

45.

All men would be cowards if they could.

Rochester, Earl

46.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.

Georges Clemenceau

48.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

49.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

50.

If the frontline people do count, you couldn't prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.