Motivational Quotes

War

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.

- Coward, Noel

Best Quotes about War

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

Weil, Simone

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

Clausewitz, Karl Von

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

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

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

Homer

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

God's delays are not God's denials.

Schuller, Robert H.

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

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

10.

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

11.

For cowards the road of desertion should be left open; they will carry over to the enemy nothing, but their fears.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Benjamin, Walter

15.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

16.

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

Reagan, Ronald

17.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

18.

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.

Massie, Allan

19.

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

Raleigh, Sir Walter

20.

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.

Coward, Noel

21.

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

22.

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

23.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Orwell, George

24.

He that does good for good's sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

Penn, William

25.

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

26.

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

Heller, Joseph

27.

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

Renard, Jules

28.

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

Ibarruri, Dolores

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.

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

31.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

George Orwell

34.

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

Andrews, C. D.

35.

I'm a hero with coward's legs.

Milligan, Spike

36.

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

37.

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

38.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

Rorty, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

Towbridge, J. T.

41.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short

42.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war --for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.

Lennon, John

43.

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

Collier, Jeremy

44.

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.

45.

The pioneers of a warless world are the young men and women who refuse military service.

Einstein, Albert

46.

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

Koestler, Arthur

47.

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

48.

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