Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

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

Junius

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

Westcott, Bishop

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

Heller, Joseph

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

Sewell, George

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Confucius

The coward threatens when he is safe.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Clemenceau, Georges

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

10.

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

11.

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

Crisp, Quentin

12.

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

13.

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

Gandhi, Mahatma

14.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?

Parrish-Bach, Leslie

20.

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

Twain, Mark

21.

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

22.

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

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.

24.

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

Albrecht, Karl

25.

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

Proverb, Irish

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

29.

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

Raleigh, Sir Walter

30.

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

Einstein, Albert

31.

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

George Orwell

32.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

33.

To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.

Confucius

34.

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

35.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

37.

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

Kitman, Marvin

38.

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

39.

Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!

Blok, Alexander

40.

A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have sometimes made a hero of the same man who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning would have proved a coward.

Stanhope, Philip Dormer

41.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters -- not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

43.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

44.

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

45.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

46.

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

47.

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein

48.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

49.

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

Meehan, Francis

50.

War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself.

Hobsbawm, E. J.