Motivational Quotes

War

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

- Massie, Allan

Best Quotes about War

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

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

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

Renard, Jules

Cowards can never be moral.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

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

Rockefeller, John D.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.

Twain, Mark

10.

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

11.

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

Heller, Joseph

12.

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

Eliot, T. S.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.

Knight, George A.

18.

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

Robert E. Lee

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

22.

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

23.

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

Sayers, Dorothy L.

24.

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

W. L. George

25.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Crisp, Quentin

26.

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.

27.

I see that old flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.

Macarthur, Douglas

28.

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

29.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

32.

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

Raleigh, Sir Walter

33.

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

34.

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

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Massie, Allan

38.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short

39.

I'm a hero with coward's legs.

Milligan, Spike

40.

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

Pound, Ezra

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Koestler, Arthur

45.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

46.

People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich - don't want to buy anything.

Frida Kahlo

47.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Cooke, E. V.