Motivational Quotes

War

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

- Kocher, Gerhard

Best Quotes about War

It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

Baudouin I

It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

Rockefeller, John D.

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

Heller, Joseph

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

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

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

Johnson, Samuel

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.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Clemenceau, Georges

12.

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

Georges Clemenceau

13.

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

Ibarruri, Dolores

14.

I'm a hero with coward's legs.

Milligan, Spike

15.

Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.

Meehan, Francis

16.

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

17.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

18.

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

19.

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

Towbridge, J. T.

20.

I see that old flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.

Macarthur, Douglas

21.

Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.

Sun Tzu

22.

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

Monica Fairview

23.

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.

Kipling, Rudyard

24.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

25.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

26.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

27.

God's delays are not God's denials.

Schuller, Robert H.

28.

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

Graves, Robert

29.

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

Reagan, Ronald

30.

Wars are made to make debt.

Pound, Ezra

31.

One of the chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.

Voltaire

32.

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

Andrews, C. D.

33.

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

34.

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

40.

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

Junius

41.

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.

42.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

44.

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

45.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

Twain, Mark

46.

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

47.

Neither enemy faces, nor the mothers that love them, come to mind when one is thinking of nothing but endeavouring to survive. Philosophising about war is useless under fire.

Linda Berdoll

48.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

49.

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

50.

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