Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

King Jr. Martin Luther

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

Blok, Alexander

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

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Benn, Tony

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Omar Bradley

Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.

Sun Tzu

Not in rewards, but in the strength to strive, the blessing lies.

Towbridge, J. T.

10.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

12.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations in life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

I think the mark of a great ruler, is not his ability to make war but to achieve peace.

Monica Fairview

14.

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood

Grant, Phillip C.

15.

Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.

Lawrence, Frieda

16.

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

Robert E. Lee

17.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

18.

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

19.

War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.

Mussolini, Benito

20.

Either war is obsolete or men are.

R. Buckminster Fuller

21.

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

22.

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

Meehan, Francis

23.

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

24.

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

Benjamin, Walter

25.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

26.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

28.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

Ulysses S. Grant

29.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

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

Johnson, Edward

31.

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

Confucius

32.

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

33.

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

George Orwell

34.

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

35.

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

Heller, Joseph

36.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

37.

Always reward your long hours of labor and toil in the very best way, surrounded by your family. Nurture their love carefully, remembering that your children need models, not critics, and your own progress will hasten when you constantly strive to present your best side to your children. And even if you have failed at all else in the eyes of the world, if you have a loving family, you are a success.

Mandino, Og

38.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Cooke, E. V.

42.

War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the sheltered life. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.

Gosse, Sir Edmund

43.

Companies that give excellent service reward employees for providing it.

44.

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

Koestler, Arthur

45.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

46.

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.

47.

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

Hazlitt, William

48.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

49.

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

50.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.