Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

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

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

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

Weil, Simone

The coward threatens when he is safe.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow -- perhaps it all will.

Einstein, Albert

10.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Carl Sandburg

11.

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

12.

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

13.

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

14.

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

Towbridge, J. T.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Confucius

20.

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

21.

The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.

Lapham, Lewis H.

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

A coward is one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.

Bierce, Ambrose

25.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

26.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations in life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

29.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

30.

War is the father of all things. But who is the mother?

Kocher, Gerhard

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

34.

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

35.

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

36.

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

Collier, Jeremy

37.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

38.

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

Robert E. Lee

39.

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

40.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.

Rockefeller, John D.

41.

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

42.

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

Sewell, George

43.

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have it's fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Einstein, Albert

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Graves, Robert

48.

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

49.

It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead for the rest of your life.

Proverb, Irish

50.

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

Hoffer, Eric