Motivational Quotes

War

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

- Proverb, Irish

Best Quotes about War

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein

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

Einstein, Albert

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

The cowards never started -- and the weak died along the way.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Benn, Tony

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Eliot, T. S.

12.

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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.

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

Homer

15.

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

16.

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

Georges Clemenceau

17.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

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

19.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

20.

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

Monica Fairview

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.

Cooke, E. V.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

Penn, William

30.

I'm a hero with coward's legs.

Milligan, Spike

31.

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

George Orwell

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

Early, Gerald

34.

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

Confucius

35.

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

Omar Bradley

36.

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

Macarthur, Douglas

37.

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

Blok, Alexander

38.

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

Reagan, Ronald

39.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

Housman, A. E.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Weil, Simone

46.

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

Sewell, George

47.

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

Kitman, Marvin

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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