Motivational Quotes

War

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

- Collier, Jeremy

Best Quotes about War

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

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

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

Collier, Jeremy

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

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

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

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

Cooke, E. V.

I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.

Frank, Anne

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

10.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

11.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

12.

A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

A just war is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

Cockburn, Alexander

16.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Kitman, Marvin

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Westcott, Bishop

24.

God's delays are not God's denials.

Schuller, Robert H.

25.

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

26.

What are we hoping to get out of it, what's it all in aid of -- is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?

Osborne, John

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Clemenceau, Georges

32.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Renard, Jules

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Georges Clemenceau

40.

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

Homer

41.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

Poe, Edgar Allan

42.

The coward threatens when he is safe.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

Weil, Simone

44.

I'm a hero with coward's legs.

Milligan, Spike

45.

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

46.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

47.

War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

48.

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

Manor, Rachel

49.

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

Andrews, C. D.

50.

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Gellhorn, Martha