Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with War.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
H. L. Mencken
The flame from the angel's sword in the garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so man's thunderbolt has become the steel star of destruction.
Sean O'Casey
War itself is the enemy of the human race.
Howard Zinn
No, I chose the name Jane Seymour because I was doing my first film, 'Ode to Lovely War,' and one of the top agents in England spotted me dancing in the chorus. I was a singer and dancer in that movie with Maggie Smith, um, and he told me he couldn't sell me as Joyce Penelope Willomena Frankenburger.
Jane Seymour
The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.
Dan Savage
To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.
Alfred Adler
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
Tony Benn
The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.
Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow
It is far easier to make war than to make peace.
Georges Clemenceau
Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer concern the Great Powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war--or war will put an end to mankind.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, The Rol
Suppose they gave a war, and no one came?
Leslie ParrishBach
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.
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Rep
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war.
Abbie Hoffman
When I hold you in my arms and I feel my finger on your trigger I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun.
John Lennon
The Volunteer AT dawn, he said, I bid them all farewell,To go where bugles call and rifles gleam.And with the restless thought asleep he fell,And glided into dream.A great hot plain from sea to mountain spread, -Through it a level river slowly drawn:He moved with a vast crowd, and at its headStreamed banners like the dawn.There came a blinding flash, a deafening roar,And dissonant cries of triumph and dismay;Blood trickled down the river's reedy shore,And with the dead he lay.The morn broke in upon his solemn dream,And still, with steady pulse and deepening eye,Where bugles call, he said, and rifles gleam,I follow, though I die!
Elbridge Jefferson Cutler, Yale
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
Dwight D Eisenhower
The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.
It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, - By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. 'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.''None,' said that other, 'save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.For by my glee might many men have laughed,And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled.http://www.pitt.edu/~pugachev/greatwar/owen.html
Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting, 1
Wars are made to make debt.
Ezra Pound
