Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

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

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.

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

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Pound, Ezra

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

Omar Bradley

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.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Bismarck, Otto Von

10.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

Vauvenargues, Marquis De

11.

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

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.

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

Homer

14.

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

15.

What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

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

17.

Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.

Knight, George A.

18.

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

Shakespeare, William

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life.

Proverb, Irish

23.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

Kraus, Karl

24.

Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

25.

Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial.

Shakespeare, William

26.

Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.

W. L. George

27.

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

Koestler, Arthur

28.

I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.

Russell, Bertrand

29.

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

30.

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

Einstein, Albert

31.

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

32.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have it's fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short

34.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

35.

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

Collier, Jeremy

36.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

39.

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

Hoffman, Abbie

40.

God's delays are not God's denials.

Schuller, Robert H.

41.

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.

42.

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

Penn, William

43.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

Weil, Simone

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

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.

48.

I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

Einstein, Albert

49.

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