Motivational Quotes

War

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about War

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

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

Twain, Mark

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

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.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

Kraus, Karl

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

King Jr. Martin Luther

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

10.

Twain, Mark

11.

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

Sewell, George

12.

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

Confucius

13.

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.

Coward, Noel

14.

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

Clausewitz, Karl Von

15.

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

16.

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

Sun Tzu

17.

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

Baudouin I

18.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

19.

So you think you can tell heaven from hell blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, a smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change? Did you exchange a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?

Waters, R.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

23.

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

Johnson, Edward

24.

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

25.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein

26.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

Rorty, Richard

27.

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

28.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

29.

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

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

Either war is obsolete or men are.

R. Buckminster Fuller

32.

A wage hike is very hard to take away, but bonuses and profit-sharing can disappear very quickly in hard times...More people are realizing that bonuses look like raises, but really aren't.

Bauman, Al

33.

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

Homer

34.

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

Eliot, T. S.

35.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

36.

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

37.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

38.

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

Heller, Joseph

39.

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.

40.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

41.

It is far easier to make war than to make peace.

Clemenceau, Georges

42.

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

George Orwell

43.

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

Georges Clemenceau

44.

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

45.

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

46.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Benjamin, Walter

47.

Neither enemy faces, nor the mothers that love them, come to mind when one is thinking of nothing but endeavouring to survive. Philosophising about war is useless under fire.

Linda Berdoll

48.

He that does good for good's sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

Penn, William

49.

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

Andrews, C. D.

50.

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