Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

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.

Either war is obsolete or men are.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men.

Westcott, Bishop

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

Cowards can never be moral.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

10.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Koestler, Arthur

11.

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

Graves, Robert

12.

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Robert E. Lee

18.

What we believe is more important than our material existence, therefore warfare is a legitimate extension of values.

Johnson, Edward

19.

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

Georges Clemenceau

20.

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

21.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Penn, William

23.

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

Will Rogers

24.

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

25.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

26.

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

27.

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

Benjamin, Walter

28.

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

Cooke, E. V.

29.

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

Eliot, T. S.

30.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Twain, Mark

31.

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

32.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

33.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

Twain, Mark

34.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

35.

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

Raleigh, Sir Walter

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Buddha

39.

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

Mencken, H. L.

40.

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

41.

Not in rewards, but in the strength to strive, the blessing lies.

Towbridge, J. T.

42.

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

Shakespeare, William

43.

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

Baudouin I

44.

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

Hoffman, Abbie

45.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Benn, Tony

46.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

47.

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

Agatha Christie

48.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

49.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

50.

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.

Asquith, Margot