Motivational Quotes

War

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

Best Quotes about War

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war --for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.

Lennon, John

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

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Ibarruri, Dolores

The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.

Walter Goodman

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Sun Tzu

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

10.

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

11.

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

Junius

12.

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

Clemenceau, Georges

13.

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Benn, Tony

14.

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

Graves, Robert

15.

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

16.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Carl Sandburg

17.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

Morality is contraband in war.

Gandhi, Mahatma

19.

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

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

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

23.

The coward threatens when he is safe.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

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

26.

There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

27.

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

28.

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

Einstein, Albert

29.

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

Omar Bradley

30.

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

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

33.

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

Sayers, Dorothy L.

34.

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

Confucius

35.

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

Proverb, Irish

36.

Cowards die a thousand deaths. The valiant taste of death but once.

Shakespeare, William

37.

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

Robert E. Lee

38.

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

Hoffer, Eric

39.

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

40.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

41.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

War is a contagion.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

43.

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

Heller, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

Meehan, Francis

46.

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

Buddha

47.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

Ulysses S. Grant

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Georges Clemenceau