Motivational Quotes

War

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

- Walter Goodman

Best Quotes about War

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

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

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people.

Davis, Rebecca Harding

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

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

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men.

Westcott, Bishop

14.

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

Kipling, Rudyard

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

19.

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

Benjamin, Walter

20.

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

Ibarruri, Dolores

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

24.

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

Kitman, Marvin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Homer

28.

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

Confucius

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

32.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

33.

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

34.

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

Heller, Joseph

35.

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

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.

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

George Orwell

38.

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

Koestler, Arthur

39.

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

Renard, Jules

40.

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

41.

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

Towbridge, J. T.

42.

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

43.

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

Manor, Rachel

44.

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

Eliot, T. S.

45.

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

Sewell, George

46.

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

Confucius

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Greater even than the pious man is he who eats that which is the fruit of his own toil; for scripture declares him twice-blessed.

Talmud, The

50.

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann