Motivational Quotes

War

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.

Best Quotes about War

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

Baudouin I

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.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

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

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

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.

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Einstein, Albert

13.

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

14.

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

Collier, Jeremy

15.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Benn, Tony

16.

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

Albrecht, Karl

17.

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

Eliot, T. S.

18.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Sir Winston Churchill

19.

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

20.

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

21.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

Weil, Simone

22.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

23.

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

24.

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

Junius

25.

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

26.

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Gellhorn, Martha

27.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

28.

The idea of thanking staff should mean giving them something that they would never buy for themselves.

Crook, Jayne

29.

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

Renard, Jules

30.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

31.

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

Westcott, Bishop

32.

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

33.

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

Will Rogers

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Omar Bradley

37.

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.

Kitman, Marvin

38.

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.

39.

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

Homer

40.

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

Sewell, George

41.

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

Shakespeare, William

42.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short

43.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

44.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

45.

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

46.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.

Rockefeller, John D.

49.

It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward.

Ibarruri, Dolores

50.

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