Motivational Quotes

War

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

- Georges Clemenceau

Best Quotes about War

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

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

Hoffman, Abbie

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

Collier, Jeremy

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

Renard, Jules

War -- what a waist of time. It's all about great achievements for the very few but hideous losses for the very many.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated -- there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

Nightingale, Florence

10.

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

Buddha

11.

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent -- war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

Sontag, Susan

12.

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

Manor, Rachel

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Mumford, Lewis

17.

I feel sure that coups d'?tat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

18.

The cowards never started -- and the weak died along the way.

19.

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

20.

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

Sayers, Dorothy L.

21.

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

Junius

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

Huxley, Aldous

26.

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

Reagan, Ronald

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Einstein, Albert

30.

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

George Orwell

31.

Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person, but with their life. Cowardice is the dread of what will happen.

Epictetus

32.

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

Shakespeare, William

33.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

Housman, A. E.

34.

Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.

Meehan, Francis

35.

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

36.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

38.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once'The Unnecessary War'.

Sir Winston Churchill

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Albrecht, Karl

45.

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

46.

War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

47.

He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.

Confucius

48.

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

49.

Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

Heller, Joseph

50.

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