Motivational Quotes

War

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

- Reagan, Ronald

Best Quotes about War

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

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

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

He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.

Confucius

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

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

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

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Johnson, Edward

10.

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

11.

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

Renard, Jules

12.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

13.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein

14.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

15.

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

16.

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

W. L. George

17.

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

18.

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

Koestler, Arthur

19.

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

Massie, Allan

20.

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

Georges Clemenceau

21.

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.

22.

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

Graves, Robert

23.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Weil, Simone

27.

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

28.

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

29.

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

30.

O can't you see, brother -- Death's a congested road for fighters now, and hero a cheap label.

Andrews, C. D.

31.

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

Hoffman, Abbie

32.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

33.

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

Baudouin I

34.

God's delays are not God's denials.

Schuller, Robert H.

35.

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

36.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.

Clausewitz, Karl Von

37.

Wars are carried out by large organizations; Peace is brought one by one.

Manor, Rachel

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.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war --for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.

Lennon, John

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Will Rogers

43.

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

44.

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

Kitman, Marvin

45.

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

Washington, Booker T.

46.

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

Heller, Joseph

47.

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

48.

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

49.

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

50.

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

Einstein, Albert