Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

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.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

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

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

Shaw, George Bernard

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Mumford, Lewis

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.

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

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

Dahlberg, Edward

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

10.

The coward threatens when he is safe.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.

Confucius

12.

Cowards can never be moral.

Gandhi, Mahatma

13.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein

14.

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

15.

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

Sun Tzu

16.

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

Sayers, Dorothy L.

17.

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

Graves, Robert

18.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Carl Sandburg

19.

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.

20.

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

Baudouin I

21.

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

Meehan, Francis

22.

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

23.

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

24.

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

Will Rogers

25.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

26.

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

27.

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

28.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

29.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Rockefeller, John D.

32.

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

Ibarruri, Dolores

33.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Manor, Rachel

35.

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

36.

The cowards never started -- and the weak died along the way.

37.

Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!

Blok, Alexander

38.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

39.

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

40.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

41.

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

Kitman, Marvin

42.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

43.

War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.

Maistre, Joseph De

44.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

45.

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

Collier, Jeremy

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

All men would be cowards if they could.

Rochester, Earl