Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

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

Either war is obsolete or men are.

R. Buckminster Fuller

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

W. L. George

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

Clausewitz, Karl Von

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Churchill, Winston

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

Buddha

10.

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

Heller, Joseph

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated -- there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

15.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once'The Unnecessary War'.

Sir Winston Churchill

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

21.

If the frontline people do count, you couldn't prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.

Albrecht, Karl

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Mahatma Gandhi

27.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short

28.

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

29.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

Agatha Christie

30.

Cowards can never be moral.

Gandhi, Mahatma

31.

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

Reagan, Ronald

32.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

33.

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.

34.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Crisp, Quentin

35.

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.

36.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Hemingway, Ernest

37.

All men would be cowards if they could.

Rochester, Earl

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Monica Fairview

42.

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

Koestler, Arthur

43.

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

Johnson, Edward

44.

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

45.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

Westcott, Bishop

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.

Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi

50.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein