Motivational Quotes

War

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about War

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

Will Rogers

11.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.

Clausewitz, Karl Von

12.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Mahatma Gandhi

13.

Cowards can never be moral.

Gandhi, Mahatma

14.

I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

Einstein, Albert

15.

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

16.

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

17.

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

18.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

19.

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

Einstein, Albert

20.

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

21.

Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.

Knight, George A.

22.

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

Hoover, Herbert Clark

23.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

24.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Benjamin, Walter

25.

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

Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Twain, Mark

29.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

Twain, Mark

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

34.

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

35.

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

Westcott, Bishop

36.

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

Einstein, Albert

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once'The Unnecessary War'.

Sir Winston Churchill

41.

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

Raleigh, Sir Walter

42.

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

43.

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

44.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

45.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

46.

If it were not for the war, this war would suit me down to the ground.

Sayers, Dorothy L.

47.

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

Homer

48.

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

Graves, Robert

49.

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

50.

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

Albrecht, Karl