Motivational Quotes

War

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

- Westcott, Bishop

Best Quotes about War

People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich - don't want to buy anything.

Frida Kahlo

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

Kitman, Marvin

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

Robert E. Lee

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

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

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

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

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

Sayers, Dorothy L.

10.

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

11.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Woolf, Virginia

12.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

13.

The effects of our actions may be postponed but they are never lost. There is an inevitable reward for good deeds and an inescapable punishment for bad. Meditate upon this truth, and seek always to earn good wages from Destiny.

Fu Wu Ming

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice -- is often the means of their regeneration.

Mill, John Stuart

17.

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

18.

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

Hoffman, Abbie

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.

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.

21.

It is the coward who fawns upon those above him. It is the coward who is insolent whenever he dares be so.

Junius

22.

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

Cooke, E. V.

23.

Companies that give excellent service reward employees for providing it.

24.

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

25.

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

Manor, Rachel

26.

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

27.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

Huxley, Aldous

28.

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

Renard, Jules

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Towbridge, J. T.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

35.

I feel sure that coups d'?tat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

36.

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

Eliot, T. S.

37.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Bismarck, Otto Von

38.

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

George Orwell

39.

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

Collier, Jeremy

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Ibarruri, Dolores

43.

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

44.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

45.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

Housman, A. E.

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.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

King Jr. Martin Luther

48.

I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

Einstein, Albert

49.

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

Clemenceau, Georges

50.

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.