Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

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

Eliot, T. S.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Pound, Ezra

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Brecht, Bertolt

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

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

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

Manor, Rachel

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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

10.

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

Rockefeller, John D.

11.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

12.

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

Meehan, Francis

13.

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

Graves, Robert

14.

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

15.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Solomon Short

16.

All men would be cowards if they could.

Rochester, Earl

17.

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

18.

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

19.

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

20.

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

21.

Either war is obsolete or men are.

R. Buckminster Fuller

22.

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

23.

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

Robert E. Lee

24.

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

25.

It is better to be killed than frightened to death.

Surtees, Robert S.

26.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

28.

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

Homer

29.

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

Georges Clemenceau

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

Junius

32.

If the frontline people do count, you couldn't prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.

Albrecht, Karl

33.

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

Einstein, Albert

34.

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood

Grant, Phillip C.

35.

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

Renard, Jules

36.

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

Twain, Mark

37.

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

Raleigh, Sir Walter

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.

Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi

42.

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush

43.

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

Baudouin I

44.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

45.

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

46.

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.

Omar Bradley

47.

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

Massie, Allan

48.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Benn, Tony

49.

I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.

Russell, Bertrand

50.

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