Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

Gandhi, Mahatma

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Mahatma Gandhi

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.

Kipling, Rudyard

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

Bierce, Ambrose

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Albrecht, Karl

The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.

Lapham, Lewis H.

I think the mark of a great ruler, is not his ability to make war but to achieve peace.

Monica Fairview

10.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters -- not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

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

Robert E. Lee

12.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

13.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

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

Baudouin I

15.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

King Jr. Martin Luther

16.

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

17.

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.

Massie, Allan

18.

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

19.

Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.

Knight, George A.

20.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

21.

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

22.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

23.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Sun Tzu

24.

Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?

Kollwitz, KaThe

25.

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

Meehan, Francis

26.

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

27.

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

28.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Towbridge, J. T.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Sewell, George

36.

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

37.

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

Eliot, T. S.

38.

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

Georges Clemenceau

39.

Cowards can never be moral.

Gandhi, Mahatma

40.

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

George Orwell

41.

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

42.

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

Voltaire

43.

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

44.

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

W. L. George

45.

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.

46.

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Thoreau, Henry David

47.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

48.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Mumford, Lewis

49.

Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city or those who choose to go to a front line, are obviously asking themselves to what extent they are cowards. But the tests they set themselves -- there is a dead body, can you bear to look at it? -- are nothing in comparison with the tests that are sprung on them. It is not the obvious tests that matter (do you go to pieces in a mortar attack?) but the unexpected ones (here is a man on the run, seeking your help -- can you face him honestly?).

Fenton, James

50.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short